[Yes, I have been away from blogging for a month. My apologies. Won’t happen again, any time soon at least.]
On Friday, 1/21/05, the NPR talk show The Connection had a one-hour segment on endangered languages. Here’s the introduction:
Disappearing Words
The influential MIT linguist Kenneth Hale once compared losing a language to dropping a bomb on a museum. And yet it is happening, all the time.
Every month, somewhere on the globe, two languages go silent. Everywhere from South Dakota to South America, Australia to Alaska when the last speaker of a language dies, the history and the culture and the memory of that language goes with them.
Most linguists agree that globalization, assimilation, disease, and natural disaster all play a role in wiping out languages. And while no one thinks there’s an easy fix for this problem — some people are dedicating their lives to reversing this trend and trying to keep languages alive.
The guests were:
- Nicholas Ostler, author of “Empires of the Word” and founder of The Foundation for Endangered Languages
- Linda Harvey, Urban Programs Coordinator at Yukon Native Language Center, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada
- Charon Asetoyer, Founder and Executive Director of the Founder and Executive Director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center
You can listen to the story.
Welcome back from your holidays.Interesting post. There have been some experiences in Northern Brazil to preserve languages, even before the speakers learned Portuguese and/or started to loose them. Although members of some communities once in a while expressed the desire for learning Portuguese, local leaders decided to establish schools to teach and use the native language(s) of their communities after some form of writing for such language(s) had already been invented. Some of such experiences have had great success, in spite of all predicaments and vicissitudes. The Tapirapé school is the example that first comes to my mind. Perhaps Luciana Storto, if she reads this, could tell us more about other successful cases.
January 26th, 2005, at 3:51 pm #By the way: the theme ‘Endangered languages is among the topics of discussion in the syntax group I co-ordinate.
January 26th, 2005, at 3:54 pm #