The Endangered Languages Armamentation Programme
One way to help protect dying languages - SpecGram—Call For Proposals—The Endangered Languages Armamentation Programme:
It is well known that a “language” is just a dialect with an army. Furthermore, it is well-known that endangered languages today are endangered because they are being replaced by encroaching majority languages.
The Endangered Languages Armamentation Programme recognizes these facts, and aims to provide the means for minority speech communities to attain the status of “languages,” while simultaneously providing for their active defence against the encroachment of their majority language neighbors.
The death of language?
An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?
Aside: Mouri? Nice fact-checking there BBC.
The problems of bilingual road signs: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated".
Collins Dictionary asks public to “rescue” outdated words
The introduction of 2,000 new words into the forthcoming edition of the dictionary has meant that some of the lesser known and used words have become endangered and face being lost from the publication.
A list of 24-threatened words has been drawn up and some celebrities have taken up the challenge of rescuing a word from oblivion.
Stephen Fry has chosen the word "fusby", which means short, stout or squat.
Dingle not An Daingean
James Harkin in The Guardian talks about overthrowing the 'yoke of ethnicity':
Dingle, for those of you who haven't been, is a remote but justly admired fishing port in Ireland. In a referendum held earlier today, its residents voted overwhelming to readopt its English name and save it from the imposition of the Irish placename, An Daingean. In the ballot, 1,005 people voted for Dingle and a mere 70 against. In an era in which democracy has lost much of its lustre, the ballot drew a massive response of 89.6%.
The local council had already begun replacing road signs bearing the word Dingle, but the residents found the name-change confusing and want to go back to living in plain old Dingle. The context for all this is potentially embarrassing to the Irish authorities. It defies the edict of the minister for rural, Gaeltacht and community affairs, for one thing, and comes amid plans for Irish to be tarted up as an official EU language next year.
Lost tribe, not so lost
Remember the amazing lost tribe that was being hawked all over the news a few weeks ago? Ahh, not so lost after all. The real story is actually a whole lot more interesting:
...far from being unknown, the tribe's existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that 'uncontacted' tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry....
According to his account, the Brazilian state of Acre offered him the use of an aircraft for three days. 'I had years of GPS co-ordinates,' he said. Meirelles had another clue to the tribe's precise location. 'A friend of mine sent me some Google Earth co-ordinates and maps that showed a strange clearing in the middle of the forest and asked me what that was,' he said. 'I saw the co-ordinates and realised that it was close to the area I had been exploring with my son – so I needed to fly over it.'...
...'When I saw them painted red, I was satisfied, I was happy,' he said. 'Because painted red means they are ready for war, which to me says they are happy and healthy defending their territory.'