“World” music is a generally unpopular genre. We tend to gravitate most towards things we understand and can easily relate to. It’s hard for many of us to sit down and actively listen to music in a foreign language because unless we can actually understand it, we can’t associate it with our own lives. For…
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Lately I’ve been making a big push for endangered and minority language awareness via alternative routes than the stuffy linguistic articles and reports that come out of academia. These are all well and good, but as I wrote in another article recently – this really isn’t the way to get indigenous language issues into the…
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Endangered and minority languages around the globe are facing extinction at an increasing rate – currently at around one every fourteen days. It is believed by many linguists that by the end of the 21st century more than half of the world’s ~7000 languages will die out entirely and be forgotten in the wake of…
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Some time ago someone at The Living Tongues Institute turned me on to a fantastic book about the value of endangered languages and the importance of revitalization efforts that I was shocked to have not yet read. K. David Harrison’s The Last Speakers is a must read for anyone – linguist or otherwise – interested in endangered…
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One of the more tragic linguistic issues – minority language loss – seems to be all about doom and gloom as we scramble frantically to put together audio dictionaries, interviews with last speakers, spread awareness and write more and more bleeding heart blog entries about why these dying languages and the cultures they embody are…
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Would you ever decide to study a language that was spoken by only 50,000 people? What about 5,000 people? 500 people? 5? Many of us make decisions about which language(s) to study based on a perception of their global worth. That is to say that we’re usually most interested in languages that can confer upon…
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