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.

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)

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?

New York City has always been an incredibly diverse place – people have been attracted to its charms and promise since the 19^th Century. Ellis Island saw people from all over the world pass through it, and their descendents now make New York a cultural melting pot.

This interesting article in the New York Times explores the linguistic side of the city, with an estimated 800 languages spoken there. The 2000 Census revealed that residents of Queens were listed as speaking 138 different languages.  It is described as the “capital of language density in the world”.  Many of these languages are dying out in other parts of the world, but continue to be spoken somewhere in New York.

Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.

Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”

But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.

“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself.” (Source: New York Times)