Why you should care about endangered languages

April 22, 2013

Endangered species. Endangered whales. Endangered languages?

What’s an endangered language?

About half of the world’s 6000 languages will be extinct in 100 years unless we act to preserve them.

In this video, I explain why you should care about languages, how linguistic diversity enriches your life and brain health and what we can do to keep languages alive.

7 COMMENTS

Ketutar J April 24, 2013 at 4:13 am

This is a really dear cause to me, and I had to stop watching with your list of “gones”… I fear there is not enough people learning these languages. People are more interested learning languages they can use, now, or some invented languages, like Klingon or Sindarin.

I wish I had the courage to go to Sapmi and learn Saami, go to Russia and learn all the Finnish languages there… but – then… what? I too will die one day.

Someone said that a dying old person is a burning library, and… in this case it’s a library with texts that don’t exist anywhere else…
- SusannaZaraysky April 24, 2013 at 9:28 am
  
  After the “gones” section in the video, I suggest people upload audio and video recordings of people speaking dying languages to http://www.endangeredlanguages.com so that we can hear how these languages sound and not just have text documents or grammar explanations of the language. By keeping a record of these languages, they will not just die with the few who know them. Others can learn them, use them in songs and keep them from extinction.
  - Ketutar J April 25, 2013 at 7:54 am
    
    I suppose I need to write a really popular serie of books where everyone speaks some endangered language… (If it only was that easy :-D)
Mizuu April 24, 2013 at 11:23 am

Hi!

I loved this movie!

I’m involved in a linguistic project on endangered languages myself.

You can view our work in progress here: http://languagesindanger.eu/

I’ll need to ask my supervisor – but can we link your movie on the page? 🙂

Cheers!
- SusannaZaraysky April 24, 2013 at 2:11 pm
  
  Mizuu,
  
  Thanks for posting about your site. The anamporphic map on http://languagesindanger.eu/map/ is great. I had no idea Nigeria had so many languages.
  
  Please do post this video on your site.
  
  Here’s the link to a movie I’m making about how an endangered European language saved a boy’s life in World War II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmh1SLRyA_Q .
  
  Feel free to post both clips. SUSANNA
Umar April 30, 2013 at 8:54 am

Excellent!
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