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BRINGING VOICES TO THE FUTURE
Assisting
indigenous communities
in
their struggle for cultural linguistic survival
Minority languages are being increasingly replaced by various
politically, economically, or socio-culturally dominant ones.
Every two weeks the last fluent speaker of a language passes on
and with him/her goes literally hundreds of generations of
traditional knowledge encoded in these ancestral tongues. Nearly
half of the world’s languages are likely to vanish in the next
100 years.
The mission of
the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages is to
promote the documentation, maintenance, preservation, and
revitalization of endangered languages worldwide through
linguist-aided, community-driven multi-media language
documentation projects.
Projects begin with
expeditions to communities to dialogue with last speakers of
endangered languages worldwide. After we obtain the permission of
the community to work with them, we discuss various courses of
action to help them meet their own goals of maintenance,
revitalization, etc. program. Story books, basic literacy materials
as well as grammatical and lexical materials in electronic and print
form may be produced. We publish our scientific work in leading
journals and in books and archive our video for the use of future
generations.
COMMUNITY TRAINING
Involving
indigenous assistants in basic linguistics and modern information
technologies can help to reverse declining prestige, bridge the
digital divide, and increase the range of uses of minority tongues.
We train community members in the use of writing systems and modern
digital media. This enables the documentation project to succeed and
be embraced by the speech community, and creates a legacy for future
generations.
PUBLIC OUTREACH
Our
responsibility to global and local communities of non-indigenous
people is to help them appreciate the cultural and linguistic
significance of often ignored minority communities, the unique
knowledge systems encoded in small languages and the value of human
cultural diversity.
To make our work accessible to the public, we build high quality
digital archives and searchable, online talking dictionaries. The process of
language endangerment, or the gradual abandonment of
one language in favor of another, is going on at an
alarming pace around the world.
Every two weeks the last fluent speaker of a language passes on and
with him/her goes literally hundreds of generations of traditional
knowledge encoded in these ancestral tongues. |
