Listen & Learn Blog

A new hub for endangered languages has been set up on the Internet.

Described as an “ark”, the site features eight “talking dictionaries” featuring dying languages from around the world. The dictionaries feature photos of cultural objects, written words and audio recordings of native speakers pronouncing words and sentences in their language. Some languages are being written down for the first time.

Alfred “Bud” Lane, one of the last fluent speakers of a Native American language called Siletz Dee-in from Oregon, said: “The talking dictionary is and will be one of the best resources we have in our struggle to keep Siletz alive.”

Other dictionaries feature Matukar Panau, an Oceanic language from Papua New Guinea which has only 600 speakers. Before the Enduring Voices team began studying it three years ago, the language had never been recorded or written. The Matukar Panau dictionary contains 3045 entries, 3035 audio files, and 67 images.

Even though they had never experienced the internet, the Matukar Panau community asked for their language to be placed on the web. They finally saw and heard their language online when computers arrived in their village last year. (Source: National Geographic)

Other dictionaries are now in production, including a ninth for Celtic tongues.

What kind of dictionary takes 90 years to complete? One from the ancient world apparently.

Scholars from The University of Chicago have just completed an Assyrian dictionary that was started in 1921. Lots of staff have worked on the project, with scholars from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London in addition to those from the US and Canada.

The dictionary was compiled from words recorded on clay or stone tablets from ruins in Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq.  When the project started the technology used included typewriters and mimeographs. Over 2 million index cards were used. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is comprised of 21 volumes, around 10,000 pages and 28,000 words. Some volumes only cover one letter.

So what is the value of a dictionary that showcases a language that died so long ago?

Gil Stein, director of the university’s Oriental Institute (the dictionary’s home), has a ready answer:

“The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world’s first urban civilization,” he says. “Virtually everything that we take for granted … has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it’s the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and most important the invention of writing.

“If we ever want to understand our roots,” Stein adds, “we have to understand this first great civilization.”

The translated cuneiform texts – originally written with wedged-shaped characters – reveal a culture where people expressed joy, anxiety and disappointment about the same events they do today: a child’s birth, bad harvests, money troubles, boastful leaders.

“A lot of what you see is absolutely recognizable – people expressing fear and anger, expressing love, asking for love,” says Matthew Stolper, a University of Chicago professor who worked on the project on and off over three decades. “There are inscriptions from kings that tell you how great they are, and inscriptions from others who tell you those guys weren’t so great. … There’s also lot of ancient versions of `your check is in the mail.’ And there’s a common phrase in old Babylonian letters that literally means `don’t worry about a thing.’” (Source: AP/Seattle Times)

Quite a story!

Have you, like me, never used Twitter? This news could tempt us – a computer science professor has set up a website to track tweets from speakers of indigenous and minority languages.

Called IndigenousTweets.com, the site currently tracks 82 languages including Cymraeg, Māori and Wolof. There are plans to add more, and some may come from the input box that allows users to add the Twitter names of other people they know who are tweeting in their native language.

Kevin Scannell, the professor behind the site, also blogs about the project. Scannell is starting to post interviews with speakers of indigenous and minority languages who are involved in language revitalization efforts and who use their languages online which should also be really interesting.

So, what are you waiting for? Get tweeting and connecting with people in your target language!

(Source: Storify)

In the news recently was the story of the two remaining speakers of Ayapaneco, who do not talk to each other.

A little closer to home the remaining speaker of Nuchatlaht, an indigenous language of Canada, remains enthusiastic about speaking the language. Alban Michael is 84 years old and has been speaking Nuchatlaht since he was a child – it was his mother’s only language. Living in a remote part of north Vancouver Island, there is little opportunity for Mr Michael to speak his native language, although a friend from a nearby Mowachaht band has a dialect that is close enough for them to be able to converse.

Work is being done to preserve these native languages, including an immersion programme that teams an ‘apprentice’ with a fluent speaker – this seems to be getting results.

According to the article in the Victoria Times Colonist:

The roughly 30,000 aboriginal people of Vancouver Island mostly came from two linguistic families, Wakashan and Salishan, further divided into six languages (there is argument over that number, since it’s not always clear where a dialect ends and a language begins).

Some overlap in the manner of Swedish and Norwegian, while some have been described as different as Russian and Congolese.

Only a few hundred of those 30,000 natives still speak the old languages fluently. The First Peoples’ Council gave this snapshot:

- A total of 115 people are fluent in the dozen dialects (including Alban’s Nuchatlaht) of Nuu-chah-nulth on the north and west Island.
- Just a dozen speakers of Ditidaht (also known as Nitinat) remain.
- Kwak’wala, the language of the Kwakwaka’wakw, who live along the inner coast and islands north of the Comox Valley, has 148 fluent speakers.
- The Salishan languages are found from Sooke, through Victoria and Duncan and up to the Comox Valley: ? Thirty remain fluent in Comox-Sliammon.
- 278 are comfortable in the dialects of Hul’q'umi’num’, found from Cowichan Bay to Nanoose.
- About 60 speak the Sencoten language of the Saanich Peninsula. The associated tongues of T’souke, Lekwungen, Semiahmoo, which were spoken from Sooke through Victoria are listed as “sleeping.”

An interesting interview from the Huffington Post today with Dr. David Harrison, director of research for the non-profit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and author of “The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages”.

Harrison believes that technology, particularly video technology, is going to be a great help in saving endangered languages. He also doesn’t think that it’s inevitable that languages will die out. Here’s an extract from the interview:

Nataly Kelly: Do you believe that technology can help prevent language loss?

David Harrison: What prevents language loss are attitudes and actions on the part of people. Technologies can be leveraged and deployed to meet that goal. I have seen many useful examples ranging from people putting up Facebook or other social networking postings in endangered languages to texting them or emailing them. I’ve just created a YouTube channel that is devoted exclusively to recordings of endangered languages. I’ve also created a number of talking dictionaries which have put several languages on the internet for the very first time.

Technology allows a small language that may have been very local and may have been only spoken, not written down and used only by a small number of speakers in a single, remote location to suddenly gain a global audience and expand beyond its current confines and eventually, to sustain itself.

Read the full interview text here.

There’s constant debate about whether endangered languages are worth preserving, but it seems fairly rare that we hear directly from those who are studying languages.

The Economist’s Johnson blog has asked linguist K. David Harrison seven questions about what is lost when a language dies – his answers are pretty interesting. Take a look at the interview here.

Harrison asserts that:

We would be outraged if Notre Dame Cathedral or the Great Pyramid of Giza were demolished to make way for modern buildings. We should be similarly appalled when languages—monuments to human genius far more ancient and complex than anything we have built with our hands—erode.

What do you think of this comparison?

A linguist studying a long-dead Native American language has been rewarded with a ‘genius grant’.

Jessie Little Doe Baird was awarded the $500,000 MacArthur Fellows grant for her work in resurrecting the Wampanoag language, an Algonquian language of New England. The language was spoken until the mid-1800s, when it disappeared, and appears to have an interesting history:

According to Baird, her ancestors were “the first American Indian people to use an alphabetic writing system,’’ and the first Bible published on this continent — a key document in her research — was printed in 1663 in Wampanoag.

After English missionaries arrived on this continent, the Wampanoag people were quick to realize the power of the written word, Baird said, especially to resolve land disputes with the Europeans. “And so Wampanoag people started to record land transfers, wills, personal letters,’’ she said. The result is what she called “the largest collection of native written documents on the continent.’’

But there are no documents from the second half of the 19th century, which to Baird suggests that Wampanoag disappeared then. Much of her task in reconstructing it as a written and spoken language is a kind of detective work.

“There was no standardized spelling for English, and there was no such thing as a dictionary,’’ she said. “So the rule of the day was spell a word any way you like. And Wampanoag people started the same tradition.’’ (Source: Boston.com)

Baird is the director of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project and one of the principal authors of a Wampnoag-English dictionary. She has also written children’s books in the language and certifies volunteers to teach it. Baird has a long list of possible uses for the grant – all of which will hopefully reinvigorate the language.

A linguist from Cambridge University, England, is headed to north-west Greenland to document Inughuit culture and language.

Stephen Pax Leonard will live with the Inughuit people for a year, producing an “ethnography of speaking” to show how their language and culture are interconnected. Their Inuktun dialect is regarded as one of the most “pure” Inuit dialects. The lifestyle of the Inughuit is threatened by climate change, with seal numbers dropping and the ice becoming too thin to use dog sleds.

Leonard’s interest in the Inughuits began 10 years ago when he read Marie Herbert’s book The Snow People, an account of life with the Inughuits, but it is only recently that he learned how imminent the threat is to their way of life and their culture.

“I just hadn’t realised how endangered the community was and this whole culture could simply die, disappear. Normally languages die out because it is parents deciding they don’t want their children to speak it.”

Leonard, who is 36, will have to adapt to many things, not least the extreme temperatures. Although the average temperature is-25C, it can plummet to -40 or soar to zero in the summer. Then there is the arctic darkness, with the sun expected to go down on 24 October and not rise again until 8 March. It is this time of year that elders talk and pass on their stories and poetry. (Source: The Guardian)

It’s great to hear of someone trying to make a real difference to a language, by documenting it and giving it back to the people it belongs to – the Inughuit. Read the full article here.

It’s become fairly common to hear about languages dying, but this is an exception.

Papiamentu, a Creole language spoken on a handful of islands off the coast of Venezuela, is showing signs of official acceptance. Spoken by around 250,000 people on the islands of Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba, the language is used by the media (print, television and radio) and Parliament as well as the people on the street.

Recognised as an official language in 2007, along with Dutch and English, Papiamentu is a rarity in a world where other languages, notably English, are dominant. With an interesting history and structure, the reasons for the languages continued existence seem to be quite complex.

Scholars, writers and composers here say Papiamentu’s resilience has roots in a mixture of radical politics and pragmatic planning. They often tie Papiamentu’s resurgence to a violent uprising against symbols of Dutch power on May 30, 1969, known here as Trinta di Mei.

“Trinta di Mei allowed us to recognize the subversive treasure we had in our language, which existed for centuries so we could keep secrets from the Dutch,” said Frank Martinus, 73, a Curaçaoan writer and founder of Kolegio Erasmo, a grade school where Papiamentu is the main language.

Papiamentu still has a way to go in usurping Dutch from some spheres. Curaçao’s laws are still written in Dutch. Some schools start out teaching children in Papiamentu, but then transition to Dutch, bowing to the economic opportunities the Netherlands still provide for many islanders. (Source: New York Times)

Read the full article here.

Frequently in the press and language blogs we read about another language dying, or becoming extinct. But there are also some stories about languages being revived through the efforts of dedicated researchers.

Two Indian languages of Long Island which have not been spoken for 200 years are being resuscitated by Stony Brook University and two local tribes. There are overwhelming odds against the success of the project – Shinnecock and Unkechaug are part of a family of eastern Algonquian languages where few records exist. As Robert D. Hoberman, chairman of the linguistics department at Stony Brook, explains:

The reclamation is a two-step process, the professor explained. “First we have to figure out what the language looked like,” using remembered prayers, greetings, sayings and word lists, like the one Jefferson created, he said. “Then we’ll look at languages that are much better documented, look at short word lists to see what the differences are and see what the equivalencies are, and we’ll use that to reconstruct what the Long Island languages probably were like.” (Source: New York Times)

There is some precedent for the project, with a number of language reclamation projects being undertaken by American Indians in recent years. This includes the Breath of Life project, created in California to revive dormant languages in the state and now with funding to extend it to Washington D.C.

The importance of the reclamation project is noted by the leader of the Unkechaug Nation:

Chief Harry Wallace, the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, said that for tribal members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding their own culture, past and present.

“When our children study their own language and culture, they perform better academically,” he said. “They have a core foundation to rely on.”