Posted on 09/18/2007 8:34:19 PM PDT by james500
When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to. Native Australian Charlie Mungulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction. From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.
While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.
Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.
In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many native languages are endangered in South America — Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia — as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.
Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.
"When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday."
As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.
That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, he said.
...
Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he explained, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
"The key to getting a language revitalized, he said, is getting a new generation of speakers. He said the institute worked with local communities and tries to help by developing teaching materials and by recording the endangered language."
How about bringing some antibiotics with you. Might help and it won't 'spoil' their culture.
My thoughts exactly. The left wants some interesting human specimens for their zoos.
Shoot, proper English is dying. No one seems to care...
susie
Languages become extinct when there are no underlying social or cultural needs that demand the continued use of that language.
GGG ping
at this rate, in 280 years we will be down to 1 language...spanish.
I wouldn’t mind seeing “Clintonese” disappear.
I think all these languages should be collected, because the study of them will tell us something about the nature of language itself. Children seem to be wired for language, but each person developes his own. No two persons have exactly the same language. By imitation learn from those around us, and so we share much the same vocabulary and idiomatic speech structure—up to a point. But we can be sure that no two person’s thoughts. Anyway, if we collect enough data, we may eventually determine what the language of “Adam” is
Can’t wait for the day when Ebonics makes the endangered language list.
Oh oh, we need an endangered languages list.....
Too bad Arabic isn’t one of them.
Chinese - hell there are a billion of them.
I would not argue with the proposition that all available info should be collected on all known languages for further analysis. I’m only questioning some of the hyper-ventilating claims that every obscure language is full of great insights about mathematics, music, everything under the sun.
Sure, we might learn something more about the nature of language and thought from studying enough different languages, and that’s a good thing, but no one ever seems to present any credible examples of the mathematical and scientific genius hidden in every obscure language.
No, but we need to understand the singularity of each language. It does encapsulate a culture, even the individual personality who is part of that culture. And as a caution, we need to know that linguistic differences mean that the speakers see the world in very different ways. Bilinguralism in the schools is, in my opinion, very dangerous. Not many students can be fluent in two languages nor even teachers, and one cannot change one’s basic mind-set just by learned a second language. Henry Kissinger left Germany when he was fourteen and only learned to speak English fluently thereafter, and of course he still speaks withe an “accent.” But he seldom spoke in German to Germans. He had left that world behind.
A: To preserve a dying language.
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