Losing Native American languages
November 2nd, 2009
The University of Utah is holding a conference of the world’s leading endangered language experts.
“A language is not just words and grammar; it is a web of history that binds all the people who once spoke the language, all the things they did together, all the knowledge they imparted to their descendants,” says Anthony Aristar, professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University. “When a language dies, it’s just the same as when a species dies. You lose a part of the network of life, and you lose everything it could impart.”
Aristar is one of fifty international experts in endangered languages who will convene at the University of Utah November 12 to 14 to take the first step in a massive undertaking to catalogue endangered and dying languages and to make the information accessible through a comprehensive online database.
The conference, The Endangered Languages Information and Infrastructure workshop, funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation, is a first-ever gathering of the world’s top minds in endangered language preservation. The workshop is the first step in a larger project to produce an authoritative, comprehensive online catalogue, database and updatable website of information on endangered languages. This database will be used to direct funding to languages and cultures which are most seriously in danger.
Language extinction is not new. In the last 500 years, half of the world’s languages have become extinct. What is new is the accelerated rate of language extinction today. Linguists predict that in the next 100 years nearly 90 percent of the world’s 7,000 languages will become extinct, with a best case scenario at only 35 to 50 percent surviving.
For a complete schedule of the conference, visit www.cail.utah.edu.
Read more about it.
