Five-Year Project Aims to Catalog Endangered Languages
Voice of America – 18 June 2008
WASHINGTON DC, USA: While there are nearly 7,000 languages, only 83 are used by a majority of the world’s population. Researchers say many of the rest are in danger of disappearing, warning that perhaps half the world’s native languages will no longer exist by the end of the century. David Harrison with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages says language extinction is a crisis of unprecedented proportions and he is trying to do something about it. “I’ve called this the greatest conservation challenge of our lifetime. I don’t mean to downplay the challenge of conserving species and ecosystems, but languages are more critically endangered,” Harrison said. “They are going extinct faster, and these languages contain some of the secrets to human survival and adaptation on our planet.” Read the article… Watch the video…
