An interesting document showcasing what spelling reform might look like for English...and its result looks very similar to another language!

A viewpoint on Aboriginal languages...

A very interesting article recently published on that munanga linguist about some of the author's work being done on dying Aboriginal languages and how they got that way...

A cab driver driven by a mission...

A taxi driver working in Greater Kaohsiung, worried that the Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), Hakka and Aboriginal languages are gradually dying off, has been giving out flyers to customers urging parents to respect their children’s right to inherit their native language by using it with them.“Once you learn how to speak a native language when you are young, it is with you forever,” he said. “Therefore the sequence of language learning should be be oral fluency in native languages, then Mandarin and then a foreign language.” Pan’s intent was to promote the idea that parents should be required to speak in their native language with their children in order to preserve the native languages.

The entire article can be read here

Outback Australia photos

G'day everyone :)

I hope to be uploading pictures of my time earlier this year working in a remote Aboriginal community of Western Australia. I was involved with fieldwork & language documentation among many other tasks. Stay tuned for pictures of all different language activities and life in the Aussie outback!

Thanks for reading :)
Lizzie

Maori language upgraded 'severely endangered' to 'endangered'

This is certainly good news for the Maori language...

Half of the 6000 languages spoken around the world are in danger of disappearing and Ruamata school principal Cathy Dewes says te reo Maori is not yet out of the woods.

Although the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) degree of language endangerment has moved the Maori language from severely endangered to endangered, Dr Dewes said: "We believe te reo has moved from severely endangered to definitely endangered but our language needs to be spoken by all generations, be transmitted intergenerationally and spoken everywhere and anywhere to survive." UNESCO works to create the conditions for dialogue among civilizations, cultures, and people, based upon respect for commonly shared values.

Click here to read the rest of the article

64 Indian dialects endangered in Mexico

Sixty-four of Mexico’s 364 Indian dialects are at “high risk” of dying out, with less than 100 speakers of each remaining, the head of the country’s National Institute of Indian Languages said Tuesday. Institute head Javier Lopez Sanchez said that in many cases, speakers of dying dialects are dispersed and no longer live in a single community. Lopez Sanchez said many parents aren’t passing their languages on to their children, and in communities in Mexico’s north, Indian children may have a passive understanding of their parent’s language but are unwilling or unable to speak it. “There are entire communities where the children don’t speak their Indian language,” he said. As an example, he noted that among the Yoremes in Sonora state, the remaining speakers are all older than 40. Many of the endangered dialects are in Baja California, and some are in southern Mexico. Click here to read the whole article

Archaeologists discover lost language

Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey. Researchers working at Ziyaret Tepe, the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tušhan, believe that the language may have been spoken by deportees originally from the Zagros Mountains, on the border of modern-day Iran and Iraq. The evidence for the language they spoke comes from a single clay tablet, which was preserved after it was baked in a fire that destroyed the palace in Tušhan at some point around the end of the 8th century BCE. Inscribed with cuneiform characters, the tablet is essentially a list of the names of women who were attached to the palace and the local Assyrian administration. To continue reading this article, click here