The Quest to Save Endangered Languages
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 12.17.09 | 11:03 AM ET
Great story in the Independent about efforts to preserve the “linguistic diversity stored in tiny pockets of speakers around the world.” Mark Turin is the point man.
The University of Cambridge academic is leading a project that aims to pull thousands of languages back from the brink of extinction by recording and archiving words, poems, chants - anything that can be committed to tape - in a bid to halt their destruction. Languages the majority of us will never know anything about.
Of the world’s 6,500 living languages, around half are expected to die out by the end of this century, according to Unesco. Just 11 are spoken by more than half the earth’s population, so it is little wonder that those used by only a few are being left behind as we become a more homogenous, global society.