Faculty works toward preserving languages by Jeremy Hunt, Daily Lobo [update]

Every two weeks, one of the world’s 7,000 languages becomes extinct.

UNM faculty is working to keep American Indian languages alive in New Mexico and trying to establish a center to help preserve them.

“The issue of language maintenance is not just some academic exercise,” said Christine Sims, a professor in the language literacy and sociocultural department. “These indigenous languages are spoken nowhere else in the world.” …

Sims said there are about 20 indigenous languages still spoken in New Mexico, and they are in danger of extinction.

Of those languages, there are three spoken only by older adults in the communities, including the Mescalero and Jicarilla pueblos, Sims said.

When a language dies, so does the culture and identity of the people who speak it, she said.

“The challenge, for the rest of us, is how do we make sure that doesn’t
happen?” she said. “These languages can’t be revitalized from any one
other source except within their community.”

The only way to
keep the languages alive is to have older generations encourage and
teach the youth to speak it, said Melissa Axelrod, a linguistics
professor who works with the Nambé tribe.

“A lot of people think
all pueblo languages are the same, but they’re completely different,”
she said. “We have this incredible, exciting diversity in New Mexico.”
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AP: Saving endangered languages – News by Randolph E. Schmid

While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world
today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to
linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

Five
hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a
briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and
the National Geographic Society.

In addition to northern
Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many
native languages are endangered in South America – Ecuador, Colombia,
Peru, Brazil and Bolivia – as well as the area including British
Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

“When
we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time,
seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics,
landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday.”

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.

That
means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the
language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature,
no text of any kind, he said. …

Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for
about 80 percent of the world’s population while the 3,500 smallest
languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world’s people. Languages
are more endangered than plant and animal species, he said.

Vanishing Languages Identified – washingtonpost.com By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer

While previous analyses have focused on individual languages that have just one or a few surviving speakers, Harrison and his colleagues took a geographic approach, identifying where in the world languages are disappearing fastest. Oklahoma
and nearby areas of the American Southwest, it turns out, have an
extremely rich linguistic fabric because of the many Native American
tribes that were corralled there in the 1800s.

Today those
languages are disappearing by the month, and with them a treasure trove
of ecological insights, culinary and medicinal secrets and complex
cultural histories, including mythologies that can teach a lot about
universal human fears and aspirations, Harrison said.

“It may
seem frivolous, but mythological traditions are attempts to make sense
of the universe, and the different ways that the human mind has tried
to grapple with the unknown and the unknowable are of scientific
interest,” he said. …

Language can reveal a lot about how a culture organizes information.
In the Paraguayan Lengua language, for example, the word “11” means
literally “arrived at the foot, one,” meaning “counted 10 fingers plus
one toe.” The word for “20” means “finished the feet.”

In Siberia’s Nivkh language, each number can be said 26 ways, depending on what is being counted.