Universal Declaration of
Linguistic Rights
a statement that argues for the protection and encouragement of minority languages. The facts provided by
the Educational CyberPlayGround expose the myth making in censored state sanctioned
text books found in the classroom written by pedantic scholars and academics, who are part of
the Education and Dictionary Indu$try $upply Chain that censors information and access.
INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE PROTECTION
ETHICS: Who owns the knowledge
contained in secret languages?
Intellectual property - bodies of
collective knowledge worked out and passed down over millennia. The threat of
bio-prospecting. Companies will swoop in and (legally) steal traditional medicinal knowledge
possessed by indigenous peoples, profiting handsomely while paying them no royalties whatsoever. Kallawaya
is an excellent example of a language that could be patented for both its form and content,
for the economic well-being of the community that invented it, and for protection against predatory
pharmaceutical corporations that seek to exploit that knowledge without recompense.
Technology alone cannot save endangered languages.
From Threatened Languages to Threatened Lives Daniel L. Everett
Digital
Technologies Give Dying Languages New Life
As many
as half the world's languages are at risk of disappearing by the end of the century. More aboriginal
groups around the world, including Oregon's Siletz tribe, are using "talking dictionaries" and
other digital tools to help preserve their native languages. There are some 7,000 spoken languages in the
world and linguists project that as many as half may disappear by the end of the century. That works out to
one language going extinct about every two weeks. Now, digital technology is coming to the rescue of some of
those ancient tongues. Members of the Native American Siletz tribe in
Oregon say their native language, Athabaskan, "is as old as time itself." But today, you can count
the number of fluent speakers on one hand. Siletz Tribal Council Vice Chairman Bud Lane is one of them.
"We had linguists that had come in and done assessments of our people and our language and they labeled
it — I'll never forget this term — 'moribund,' meaning it was headed to the ash heap of
history," Lane says.
The word translations are now available online,
along with lesson plans, as part of a so-called "talking dictionary" hosted by
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Swarthmore linguistics professor David Harrison has also posted
talking dictionaries for several other highly endangered languages from around the world at the site.
Harrison and a colleague in Oregon have also mapped hotspots for endangered
aboriginal languages. One such region is the Pacific Northwest. Tribal languages in Oklahoma and the
American Southwest are also judged to be at risk of extinction.
"When Languages Die" author/linguist K. David
Harrison
Informative conversation with K. David Harrison, assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College
near Philadelphia and the author of the new book "When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's
Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge". He is the Director of Research at the Living Tongues
Institute and was recently featured in the documentary called "The Linguists"
which followed hands-on linguistic field work in countries around the world. In this fascinating interview,
Harrison discusses the critical importance of the world's many threatened languages and the vital
knowledge that each language uniquely packages and holds for all of us. Harrison also discusses the need for
more trained linguistic personnel to go out into some of the remotest parts of the world to document these
nearly extinct languages before they are lost to humanity forever.