Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
a statement that argues for the protection and encouragement of minority
languages. The facts provided by the Educational CyberPlayGround expose
the
myth making
in
censored state sanctioned text books
found in the classroom written by pedantic scholars and academics, who
are part of the Education and Dictionary Indu$try $upply Chain that
censors information and access.
INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE PROTECTION
ETHICS: Who owns the knowledge contained in secret languages?
Intellectual property - bodies of
collective knowledge
worked out and passed down over millennia. The threat of
bio-prospecting.
Companies will swoop in and (legally) steal traditional medicinal
knowledge possessed by indigenous peoples, profiting handsomely while
paying them no royalties whatsoever. Kallawaya is an excellent example
of a language that could be
patented
for both its form and content, for the economic well-being of the
community that invented it, and for protection against predatory
pharmaceutical corporations that seek to exploit that knowledge without
recompense.
Technology alone cannot save endangered languages.
From Threatened Languages to Threatened Lives Daniel L. Everett
Digital Technologies Give Dying Languages New Life
As many as half the world's languages are at risk of disappearing by the
end of the century. More aboriginal groups around the world, including
Oregon's Siletz tribe, are using "talking dictionaries" and other
digital tools to help preserve their native languages. There are some
7,000 spoken languages in the world and linguists project that as many
as half may disappear by the end of the century. That works out to one
language going extinct about every two weeks. Now, digital technology is
coming to the rescue of some of those ancient tongues. Members of the
Native American
Siletz
tribe in Oregon say their native language, Athabaskan, "is as old as
time itself." But today, you can count the number of fluent speakers on
one hand. Siletz Tribal Council Vice Chairman Bud Lane is one of them.
"We had linguists that had come in and done assessments of our people
and our language and they labeled it — I'll never forget this term —
'moribund,' meaning it was headed to the ash heap of history," Lane
says.
The word translations are
now available online
, along with lesson plans, as part of a so-called
"
talking dictionary
"
hosted by Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
Swarthmore linguistics professor David Harrison
has also posted talking dictionaries for several other highly endangered
languages from around the world at the site. Harrison and a colleague in
Oregon have also
mapped hotspots
for endangered aboriginal languages. One such region is the Pacific
Northwest. Tribal languages in Oklahoma and the American Southwest are
also judged to be at risk of extinction.
"When Languages Die" author/linguist K. David Harrison
Informative conversation with K. David Harrison, assistant professor of
linguistics at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia and the author of
the new book "When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's
Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge". He is the Director of
Research at the Living Tongues Institute and was recently featured in
the
documentary called "The Linguists"
which followed hands-on linguistic field work in countries around the
world. In this fascinating interview, Harrison discusses the critical
importance of the world's many threatened languages and the vital
knowledge that each language uniquely packages and holds for all of us.
Harrison also discusses the need for more trained linguistic personnel
to go out into some of the remotest parts of the world to document these
nearly extinct languages before they are lost to humanity forever.