But as Singapore cements its position as a financial services hub and top regional tourist destination, the Government is trying to persuade locals to speak standard English. The Government says mastery of English is imperative to raise living standards.
As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote [...]
Dan Everett “Out on a limb over the Piraha”:
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 [...]
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.
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“.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
