Watch Your Language Blog

Documenting Endangered Languages

Another website joins the effort to preserve endangered languages: Enduring Voices. (via Three Percent)

From the project's mission statement:

Nearly 80 percent of the world's population speaks only one percent of its languages. When the last speaker of a language dies, the world loses the knowledge that was contained in that language. The goal of the Enduring Voices Project is to document endangered languages and prevent language extinction by identifying the most crucial areas where languages are endangered and embarking on expeditions to:
* Understand the geographic dimensions of language distribution
* Determine how linguistic diversity is linked to biodiversity
* Bring wide attention to the issue of language loss
The project marks "language hotspots" geographically and features interactive reports on both the regions and the languages that are most at risk.

Tags: endangered languages
November 7, 2008