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

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

Keeping Indigenous Languages Alive

The Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program is documenting and rebuilding the Mojave bird song cycle in a partnership between the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe along the Colorado River and Arizona State University’s Center for Indian Education.
Part of the program is dedicated to retaining the Mojave bird songs, which are traditionally songs of celebration. The songs are also part of a larger oral tradition that communicates values and carry lessons of cultural importance to Mojave people, says Teresa McCarty, co-director of the CIE and professor in the School of Social Transformation. One aim of the grant is to document and rebuild the song cycle, which has become less defined with the erosion of the Mojave language. Along with the cultural significance the songs hold, they also contain unique aspects of the Mojave language.


You can read the full article here

New home movies resurrect endangered Native American language

University of Minnesota Duluth education professor Mary Hermes says saving an endangered language goes beyond just enriching the people who speak it. "I think people have got to get beyond thinking it's just for the Ojibwe people, that we want to save their Ojibwe language. There's 10,000 years of human evolution and knowledge in that language," she says. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Hermes is combining the skills of native speakers with video technology to help others, young and old, learn the language in the most natural way. She's doing it by videotaping short movies of everyday situations, from going to a rummage sale to planting a garden to helping out a sick relative. "Because Ojibwe isn't spoken on a regular basis, there's not a store or a rummage sale or a resort, but part of what we're doing is trying to re-envision what that would be like," explains Hermes.

Thanks to Living Languages where I first read this :)

The rest of this article + (very interesting) video can be accessed here

Fight for Nyoongar language

A QUEENS Park-based Aboriginal group is fighting to preserve the Nyoongar language. The language appears in Western Australian culture, and is featured on street signs, place names and during Welcome to Country ceremonies. However, Nyoongar Language Program interim chairman Joe Collard said such references were not understood and the language was slowly dying out.“Names like Joondalup and Dwellingup – these are our place names that have wonderful histories,” he said. “So many place names across the South-West derive from Nyoongar words, which have associated stories. We could offer these stories to people.” Mr Collard said he was concerned with the low number of fluent Nyoongar language speakers.

To continue reading this article, click here

Japanese linguist helps revive an Aboriginal language

In north Queensland the Worrongo language is coming back to life. It's taken 40 years but from almost the ashes of extinction, an Aboriginal language has been saved and is again being spoken on Palm Island in North Queensland. The last living speaker of the Worrongo language is a Japanese professor who created a dictionary after learning it from one of the last native speakers in the early 1970s.

Read the full story here

Workshop works to revitalize Native American - Tlingit - language

Elders, fluent Tlingit speakers, language teachers and learners gathered in Juneau recently to work towards Tlingit language revitalization. The “Honoring Our Ancestors, Teaching Our Language” workshop was sponsored by Goldbelt Heritage Foundation through an Administration for Native Americans language grant; the grant was titled “Tlingit Language Flowing Through Generations: A Region wide Approach to Language Revitalization'.

Teachers work with elders throughout the year enhancing their understanding of the verb forms and then take that new knowledge and translate it into language lessons for youth. Every member of this team is committed to language revitalization and the benefits inherent herein to heal past historical trauma many of our elders experienced from being punished for speaking their first language within schools. Holding on to the language is a crucial endeavor as teachers strive to learn from our fluent speakers.

Read the article in full here

Cape Cod's first language is spoken again

Imagine helping to recreate the language your ancestors spoke. You have to start thinking like them, even if you don’t have all their words, and even if they did not have to name all the things that you work with today. “There must have been a word, for example, for watermelon,” Nitana Hicks of Mashpee told an audience at Tales of Cape Cod in Barnstable Village this week, but that word had been lost as use of the language died out because of the dominance of white settlers. So, said Hicks, who was talking about her part in a reclamation project for the language of the Wampanoag, she thought that “wet-squash” suited the summer fruit. By agreement of others, then, in modern Wampanoag, “wet-squash” it is. Right now, there is a 7-year-old child on Cape Cod who is being raised with the native tongue as her first language. Hicks said 250 families are enrolled in classes that allow everyone of native descent “to get to the level they want.”

As preliminary work, the language project has created a dictionary, some Wampanoag-based word games, coloring and storybooks, and even a three-day “immersion camp” where only the native language is spoken. A major characteristic of the language that Hicks called “complicated” is that it does not distinguish between genders but does separate “animate” and “inanimate.”

Click here to read the full article

Australian project hunts lost indigenous languages

Librarians in Australia have launched a three-year project to rediscover lost indigenous languages. The New South Wales State Library says fragments of many lost languages exist in papers left by early settlers. Before British colonialisation began there in 1788, around 250 aboriginal languages were spoken in Australia by an estimated one million people. Only a few dozen languages remain and the communities number around 470,000 people in a nation of 22 million.

The rest of this article can be read here

Federal Agencies Take Action to Digitally Document Nearly 50 Endangered Languages

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the award of 10 fellowships and 24 institutional grants totaling $3.9 million in the agencies' ongoing Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program.

This is the seventh round of their campaign to preserve records of languages threatened with extinction. Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are bound for oblivion in this century, and the window of opportunity for high-quality language field documentation, they say, narrows with each passing year.

These new DEL awards will support digital documentation work on almost 50 endangered languages, enhance the computational infrastructure of the field and provide training for the next generation of researchers.

To continue reading this article, click here

Endangered Alphabets

In doing some linguistic research, I came across a fascinating project, called the Endangered Alphabets Project. Fundraising is needed for this project - below is an introduction to it & the full website can be accessed here, at The Endangered Alphabets Project.

The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written.

Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.

The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of fourteen carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to bring attention to this issue.

Languages on Papua vanish without a whisper

Who will speak Iniai in 2050? Or Faiwol? Moskona? Wahgi? Probably no-one, as the languages of New Guinea — the world’s greatest linguistic reservoir — are disappearing in a tide of indifference. New Guinea is home to more than 1,000 languages — around 800 in Papua New Guinea and 200 in Indonesian Papua — but most have fewer than 1,000 speakers, often centred around a village or cluster of hamlets. The most widely-spoken language is Enga, with around 200,000 speakers in the highlands of central PNG, followed by Melpa and Huli.
More than 200 languages have become extinct around the world over the last three generations and 2,500 others are under threat, according to a UNESCO list of endangered languages, out of a total of 6,000.

The rest of this article/report can be viewed here

NSW Government announces funding for Aboriginal Language Centre

Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Victor Dominello MP has announced funding for the creation of the Centre for Aboriginal Languages Coordination and Development (CALCD). "I share the view of Aboriginal communities that reclaiming and maintaining Aboriginal language and culture is imperative, as it instills a greater sense of identity, pride and confidence in people and leads to increased school attendance and participation....We have listened to members of numerous Aboriginal communities and we are pleased to redirect funds from the bureaucracy to this community-based Aboriginal organisation to focus on language revitalisation," Minister Dominello said.

To read the rest of the announcement, click here

Saving Language - ABC New England North West NSW - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

LOUISA REBGETZ, PRESENTER: A new push is underway to save the Northern Territory's Indigenous languages. The Northern Territory Library is launching a range of children's books that capture Indigenous stories in Indigenous languages. And in the community of Elliott about half way between Alice Springs and Darwin the new books are having a big impact. Laetitia Lemke reports.

Saving Language - ABC New England North West NSW - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Reviving a dead Alaska Native language

There was big news last year for the Eyak language, the arrival of 22-year-old Guillaume Leduey, a French student who had stumbled upon Eyak while randomly surfing the Internet at age 15. Leduey had taught himself to speak Eyak using materials he ordered from Alaska. His 2010 trip to the United States came at the invitation of Michael Krauss, University of Alaska linguistics professor, and the only living speaker of Eyak on the planet since the death of Marie Smith-Jones, honorary Eyak chief and the last fluent Eyak speaker of the language; and, Laura Bliss-Spaan, a former television reporter who has taken up preservation of the language as a personal mission since discovering Eyak while covering the Cordova Iceworm Festival years ago.

To continue reading about the Eyak language revitalization, click here

Ayapaneco language at risk of dying

Anthropologists are racing to compile a dictionary of the centuries-old Ayapaneco tongue, spoken in Mexico. There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other's company.

The dictionary is part of a race against time to revitalise the language before it is definitively too late. "When I was a boy everybody spoke it," Segovia told the Guardian by phone. "It's disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me." This compiled dictionary is due out later this year.

The rest of the report can be read here, and a full list of the endangered languages of the world can be viewed here; this long list includes languages that are vulnerable, those that are definitely endangered, those critically endangered, & those which are extinct.

Report: Swedish language under threat in Finland

The Council of Europe thinks Swedish as an official language in Finland is under threat, according to Finnish broadcasting association YLE. In an upcoming report on minority languages the Council of Europe states that Swedish as an official language in Finland is under threat due to officials’ poor Swedish skills and deficiencies in the mandatory Swedish tuition in schools.

Kimmo Sasi of the Finnish Constitutional Law Committee is not surprised by the Council’s findings. He thinks that the matter must be taken seriously. “We will look into it and try to come up with solutions for the ministry of education on how to deal with these issues,” Sasi told Yle.

The Finnish language laws from 2003 specify that the official languages of Finland are Finnish and Swedish. Both languages have the same legal status and authorities in bilingual municipalities must offer their services in either language. The Council has on many occasions pointed to the difficulty in using the Swedish language in Finland, despite the right to be served in Swedish is stipulated in the Finnish constitution. Recently the Finnish parliamentary ombudsman ruled that there should be clearer guidelines at health centres as to what information and medical records should be made available in the patient’s mother tongue. Although the medical records will be allowed to remain kept in Finnish, it must be possible for a Swedish-speaking patient to get access to a Swedish translation. This followed a demand from the Swedish Assembly in Finland (Folktinget) in 2009 that all medical records of Swedish speakers should be kept in Swedish.

Swedish is a compulsory subject in Finnish schools today, a fact that has been criticised from many sides over the years.
More recently the right wing party True Finns (Sannfinländarna) have been demanding the abolishment of obligatory Swedish in Finnish schools. The Council of Europe is now recommending that Finland improves the level of Swedish classes in school and ensures services in Swedish for Swedish-speakers. According to Sasi, the Constitutional Committee will do what they can to give the matter the deserved attention. “It might not lead to any definite measures but at least it will increase the pressure to do something about it,” Sasi told YLE.

Finland was a part of Sweden until 1809 when the area was lost to Russia. The country has been an independent nation since 1917.

The report can be viewed online here

Translating the Bible into exotic & rare languages

Fritz Goerling sits at his desk in a neighbourhood of Munich, Germany, making clicking and smacking sounds with his mouth.
'We have hardly any letters in our alphabet for such sounds,' said Goerling, a specialist in translating the Bible into exotic languages.

The sounds he makes are common in the language of the Jula, a small African ethnic group, but they didn't exist in written form until Goerling developed them. The project took 25 years starting when Goerling, with the help of a few Jula from Ivory Coast, learned the language. Matching symbols were borrowed from the international phonetic alphabet and taught to local people in the ethnic group. The reason for all the effort is to ensure that the Jula have a written copy of the Bible.

Demand for versions of Christianity's essential book in native languages spoken in all parts of the world is increasing, particularly in Africa. We want to reach people in their native tongue because it is the language of their heart,' said Goerling, 67. Many Jula know the Arabian script, but it lacks vowels for many spoken words. Thus, there was no word for an integral word like temple, for example.

However, translating something from one language into any other language is not a simple task - nuances from both the word-meaning level & the syntactic level need to be dealt with, and this can be more challenging in some languages than others, depending on the language you are translating from, into the language you are translating into.

Translation can easily be turned into nonsense - what makes sense in one language, syntactically, may make absolutely no sense in another language. This is also true phonologically - in the spoken language of the Jula there is the word 'ba,' which has three different meanings depending on the emphasis used to express it. In a low voice (or low tone), the word means mother. When the word is spoken in a middle-range (mid-tone) it means river, and when it is spoken in a a higher voice (high tone) it means goat. A mixup (however unintentional) can be quite insulting.

Click here to read in full the article.

The Hebrew hotline: Keeping an ancient language modern

Modern Hebrew, which can now be heard everywhere on the streets of Israel, has continued to evolve since it was reintroduced as a living language. Eliezer Ben Yehuda is the man many credit with reviving the Hebrew language more than 100 years ago. Ben Yehuda's son, Itamar Ben Avi, was the first native Hebrew speaker. He had a thoroughly miserable childhood - home-schooled, locked up by his parents, and not allowed to play outside with other children so that he would not be exposed to any other languages. Itamar was three-and-a-half when he spoke his first Hebrew word.

Part of the difficulty in bringing an old language back to life was that, well, life had changed. The words that existed in the Bible often described rather grand ideas like love, war, and peace. But that was no help when trying to get shopping done - there were no words back then for ice cream or jelly, or underwear. So Ben Yehuda and his friends simply made them up, using old Hebrew roots to hint at the new words' meaning. And that process is still happening today.

The modern Hebrew language is growing all the time with around 20 new words being officially added each year. Approving these new words can be a lengthy process. A committee has to consider them, and it can take several years to reach a decision. And even after all that - there is no guarantee that the public will accept the words. Language is a sensitive issue in Israel. It is even discussed in the Knesset.

In 2005, Israel's then prime minister Ariel Sharon chastised Israelis for using the Arab-English hybrid expression "yala bay" to say farewell to each other (you hear it everywhere in Israel). Instead, Sharon argued, they should be using what he referred to as "the most beautiful word", shalom.

You can read the whole article here

Language Diversity Index tracks global loss of mother tongues

For the past several years, we have been hearing anecdotal reports about endangered languages – how we’re losing languages by the day, how we may lose 50-90 percent of languages before the end of the century. But nobody had any reliable quantitative data to corroborate these claims,” says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and director of Terralingua, an international NGO devoted to sustaining the biocultural diversity of life through research, education, policy, and on-the-ground work.

”But now a new Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD), the first of its kind, shows quantitatively, for the first time, what’s really happening with the world’s languages,” Maffi adds. “The ILD shows in quantitatively rigorous ways what the trends have been over the past 30 years in the numbers of mother-tongue speakers of the world’s languages–and the news is not good: an overall decline of more than 20 percent in that period alone.”

Click here to continue reading the rest of the report & interview on the LDI.