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

Multiple meanings and why we have them

Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious -- as a way for individuals to exchange information -- linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years. Many prominent linguists, including MIT’s Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is, in fact, poorly designed for communication. Such a use, they say, is merely a byproduct of a system that probably evolved for other reasons -- perhaps for structuring our own private thoughts. As evidence, these linguists point to the existence of ambiguity: In a system optimized for conveying information between a speaker and a listener, they argue, each word would have just one meaning, eliminating any chance of confusion or misunderstanding. Now, a group of MIT cognitive scientists has turned this idea on its head. In a new theory, they claim that ambiguity actually makes language more efficient, by allowing for the reuse of short, efficient sounds that listeners can easily disambiguate with the help of context.

To read the rest of this interesting take on why our words may have multiple meanings, click here

Census finds fewer than a half-million Native American language speakers; majority Navajo

More people speak Navajo at home than any other Native American language, a seemingly promising 169,000 people at a time when some tribes have lost their native tongue or are struggling to retain the words of their ancestors. Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, a Navajo professor at Northern Arizona University, said the figure recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau is no surprise, but can be misleading. The country’s population of Navajos is well over 300,000. For every one who speaks the language, one doesn’t — and those are likely younger Navajos, Yazzie said.The loss of Native languages is rooted in a history that includes the federal government’s attempt to eradicate Native American culture by sending children to boarding schools and punishing them for speaking their language. “That’s one thing all Indian nations suffer from,” Yazzie said. “Youth are ashamed of that because it caused a lot of harm. They internalized it. ... Now we’re trying to turn that around and say, ‘The languages are beautiful.’”

Click here to read the full article

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs leaves legacy in Cherokee language

The Cherokee Nation lowered its flags to half mast Oct. 6 in honor of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, 56, who died Oct. 5 in California after a long battle with cancer. For the Cherokee Nation, its work with Apple has resulted in the adaptation of the Cherokee language to modern technology and renewed hope that the language will not only survive, but thrive. In 2003, Apple began supporting the Cherokee language by including a font and keyboard in the company’s computer operating system. 'Anything a person can do in English can be done in Cherokee in part because of [Steve Jobs'] innovations and his support of [the] language', CN Language Technologist Joseph Erb said.

To read the full article, click here

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

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

Dictionary Of Ancient Akkadian Provides Glimpse Into Civilization’s Cradle

Linguists and researchers of ancient Mesopotamia began compiling the dictionary in 1921. The dictionary, which spans some 10,000 pages in 21 volumes, took no less than nine decades to complete. In the process, it outlived some of the nearly 100 scholars who devoted their careers to it. The final volume, published just weeks ago, caps what editor-in-charge Martha Roth describes as far beyond a mere lexicon. "There are about 28,000 entries in this -- 28,000 words -- that provide a window into the history, culture, and society of the ancient Near East. This was not designed to be a glossary. The entire project sought to explicate the world of ancient Mesopotamia through the words we have preserved," Roth says. Like each reference for each of the dictionary's words, it was discovered on one of the millions of tablets that have survived the centuries. And each line of wedge-shaped cuneiform writing, carved into the clay, has a story to tell.

To read the article in full, click 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.

The Status of the Least Documented Language Families in the World

This paper, by Harald Hammarström, aims to list all known language families that are not yet extinct and all of whose member languages are very poorly documented, i.e., less than a sketch grammar’s worth of data has been collected. It explains what constitutes a valid family, what amount and kinds of documentary data are sufficient, when a language is considered extinct, and more. It is hoped that the survey will be useful in setting priorities for documentation fieldwork, in particular for those documentation efforts whose underlying goal is to understand linguistic diversity.

This interesting report can be accessed here, through the Language Documentation & Conservation site.

A View from England: What did you say?

"It's well-known that England and America are two countries divided by a common language, but I wonder how many people realize that even the simplest words can have different meanings and be cause for confusion."

An interesting read of the differences between American English and British English can be found here...

Australia tries to halt loss of Aboriginal languages

A recent article about language loss, language revival, and language maintenance, and bilingual schooling, in Australia.

Click here to read about Australia's attempts to save our Indigenous languages...

More Students Choose a Junior-Year Abroad in the Middle East

This article is interesting: American college students are increasingly choosing to spend their traditional junior year abroad in places like Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, wanting to experience the Arab world beyond America’s borders and viewpoints.