lexico
Chukchi Salmon
A statement from the International Linguistics Congress, 1992, Quebec:
Do you think language description by linguists can help salvage some of the dying languages?
If your mother tongue isn't English, what do you think will happen to it in say 2100 in comparison to English?
W. Wayt Gibbs, Saving Dying Languages, Scientific American 2002:
http://www.language-archives.org/docs/sciam.pdf
David Crystal, Language Death, full text:
http://assets.cambridge.org/052101/2716/frontmatter/0521012716_frontmatter.pdf
UNESCO, Language Vitality and Endangerment:
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en...9200105language_vitality_and_endangerment.pdf
UNESCO, Safeguarding of Endangered Languages:
http://lesla.univ-lyon2.fr/IMG/pdf/doc-447.pdf
Links#1: http://www.unesco.org/most/ln2lin.htm#resources
Links#2: http://www.longnow.org/about/press.htm
UNESCO's response at the General Assembly, Endangered Languages Project Progress Report, 1994:As the disappearance of any one language constitues an irretrievable loss to mankind, it is for UNESCO a task of great urgency to respond to this situation by promoting and, if possible, sponsoring programs of linguistic organizations for the description in the form of grammars, dictionaries and texts, including the recording or oral literatures, of hitherto unstudied or inadequately documented endangered and dying languages.
Response from the Foundation for Endangered Languages, 1995, London:Although its exact scope is not yet known, it is certain that the extinction of languages is progressing rapidly in many parts of the world, and it is of the highest importance that the linguistic profession realize that it has to step up its descriptive efforts.
Do you think this is actually going to happen?There is agreement among linguists who have considered the situation that over half of the world's languages are moribund, i.e. not effectively being passed on to the next generation. We and our children, then, are living at the point in human history where, whithin perhaps two generations, most languages in the world will die out.
Do you think language description by linguists can help salvage some of the dying languages?
If your mother tongue isn't English, what do you think will happen to it in say 2100 in comparison to English?
W. Wayt Gibbs, Saving Dying Languages, Scientific American 2002:
http://www.language-archives.org/docs/sciam.pdf
David Crystal, Language Death, full text:
http://assets.cambridge.org/052101/2716/frontmatter/0521012716_frontmatter.pdf
UNESCO, Language Vitality and Endangerment:
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en...9200105language_vitality_and_endangerment.pdf
UNESCO, Safeguarding of Endangered Languages:
http://lesla.univ-lyon2.fr/IMG/pdf/doc-447.pdf
Links#1: http://www.unesco.org/most/ln2lin.htm#resources
Links#2: http://www.longnow.org/about/press.htm
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