Globalization is often seen as a unidirectional and unidimensional process driven by a Western-dominated global market economy and tending to standardize, modernize and transnationalize in ways harmful to cultural diversity. The focus is on the threat posed to local cultural products and practices by globalized consumer goods and services-on how television and video productions are tending to overtake traditional forms of entertainment, how pop and rock music are drowning out indigenous music, or how convenience food is dulling the appetite for local cuisine. Some forms of cultural diversity are clearly more vulnerable than others. Vernacular languages are recognized as being particularly at risk, notably from the continuing expansion of English but also from the advance of vehicular languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Spanish and Swahili. This process tends to be extremely rapid -as illustrated by the emphasis placed by many parents on schooling their children in vehicular languages at the expense of mastery of their mother tongue.