HENRY

The big news of the week is about the Enduring Voices project run by National Geographic which is getting coverage all over the place. National Geographic has even released a video where they race to record the last known speaker of “the extinct language” Amurdag.

The best article I’ve seen so far is at The Independent by Claire Soares:

Linguists believe half the languages in the world will be extinct by the end of the century. The 80 major languages such as English, Russian and Mandarin are spoken by about 80 per cent of the global population, while the 3,500 linguistic minnows have just 0.2 per cent of the world keeping them alive.

“The pace of language extinction we’re seeing, it’s really unprecedented in human history,” said Dr David Harrison, author of the book When Languages Die. “And it’s happening faster than the extinction of flora and fauna. More than 40 per cent of the world’s languages could be considered endangered compared to 8 per cent of plants and 18 per cent of mammals.

Although Randolph Schmid in The Huffington Post is also worth reading:

When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there’s still no one to talk to. Native Australian Charlie Mungulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction. From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.

Needless to say the linguistic commentary on this has been interesting to watch, as this raises a number of rather important issues about how to get people interested in language preservation.

First, Language log posts a rather bored sounding piece “Yes, they’re still dying“, showing the standard sort of resigned depression about language extinction.

In contrast, the real fun is over at PARADISEC’s Transient Language and Cultures blog which asks the damn good question of how linguistics can take advantage of this PR-blitz fly-in, fly-out linguistics to help endangered languages and their speakers?

Another important issue is raised by Claire Bowern, who points out some intellectual property/accurate reporting issues with this “parachute linguistics” approach. The apparently extinct Amurdag language that we see being rescued in National Geographic’s video (above), isn’t extinct, nor was it previously unknown:

The expedition didn’t discover a speaker of a language thought to be extinct for 25 years (Amurdag) - otherwise how did Robert Handelsman manage to do an Honours Thesis on it at the University of Melbourne (and compile a draft dictionary in 1998)? Robert Mailhammer is currently working on the language. If Harrison et al are going to portray themselves as the Great White Saviours of a bunch of languages, they could at least have the decency to check on previous research and current knowledge.

Posted on September 20th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill