Depressing Fact of the Day
...but an interesting article, overall:
...five Indian subcontinent languages were irretrievably wiped out during the tsunami that obliterated islands in the Bay of Bengal earlier this year.
Think about it for a second or two; five actual languages gone in pretty much the blink of an eye. We're used to thinking about the death of languages as sort of a long, drawn-out, process, giving everybody lots of time to put together grammars, collect archives, and so on, but not in this case. It's kind of an eerie thought, actually.
2 comments:
Thanks for the comment! I suppose, in the area of preventing the death of languages, that one might look at Irish or Welsh as models, but you would probably know better than I. As far as Native American languages are concerned, I know that there is a push on to preserve them up here, especially in the Northwest Territories, which has about nine official languages. I could not comment on the success of these measures, however.
Thanks for the compliment!
I'm actually in Alberta, where the Native language situation is largely dominated by Cree. I actually used to work at a university bookstore, and the Cree-English dictionary was one of the more popular choices from the language section. My experience with the NWT came a few years ago, when a family member was living up in Yellowknife.
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