Endangered Languages Library

Qaqasauraq. Noun. The modern Inupiaq term for a computer. Loosely translated, it means “little brain.”

Ready to learn more? Fire up the qaqasauraq for the latest of three new computer programs designed to teach variations of the fading Alaska Native language.

The North Slope Borough and Rosetta Stone software company plan to unveil a program this spring specially designed to teach the North Slope Inupiaq dialect, using the photos and voices of Inupiaq people recorded in Barrow.

There are as few as 1,500 fluent speakers of Inupiaq in Alaska, estimates Fairbanks linguist Michael Krauss. Once, it was the primary language of the northern and northwest regions of the state.

Barrow-born Edna MacLean, a former Inupiaq professor for the University of Alaska Fairbanks, spent two years working on the Inupiaq program. She translated thousands of words and phrases from English to the North Slope Inupiaq dialect of the Inuit language.

The job is nearly done. Soon the program will be available to schools and households. Just in time for Inupiaq language experts like MacLean, 66.

Read the full article.

Photo from the intrepid social sciences teacher currently teaching  in an Inupiaq village on the Seward Peninsula.

A fun video from busuu.com, a website for language learning. Busuu is a language from northwest Cameroon and was reported to have 8 speakers back in 1986 by a certain R. Breton (a prolific cataloguer of African languages, if I may note), according to the Ethnologue. It’s highly likely those 8 are not alive today. A user comment on the video claims the actors are speaking are Njikun, which isn’t listed on Ethnologue but is catalogued in “A Dictionary of Cameroon English Usage” by Jean-Paul Kouega (page 44, referring to work done by Dieu and Renaud, 1983). Regardless of its objectives or how it was made, it hopefully still highlights the plight of languages with few speakers.

A New York Times article from April of this year highlights the effort of the Endangered Language Alliance, a group of individuals who have taken upon the mighty task of working towards documenting languages that are endangered, starting with the many communities in New York City. Some experts estimate there are as many as 800 languages spoken there, far more than official census records show. The immigrants who have flocked to the city give rise for many opportunities to investigate the pockets of languages that continue to be spoken – the challenge, no doubt, is to find them.

On Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, 76, a retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran 45 years ago, is compiling a Mandaic dictionary.

The ELA has organized a few town meetings as well as local lectures at CUNY. If you’re in the area, be sure to follow their progress.

In the world today there are roughly 6500 languages, of which less than 30 will have more than 2000 speakers. The reason we say roughly is because it is very difficult to classify what is a distinct language. There is a fine line between when a language is the same language with a different dialect or should be considered a completely new language. After a quick search of the internet this discrepancy is very obvious. Some of the numbers that I came across were, 6500, 6912, 6,809. The final number is from a source called ethnologue.com which is one of the most comprehensive sources for language classification which we have.

It is important to take the numbers associated with languages and language loss with a grain of salt. The numbers should be used to give an overall sense of trends and not as accurate representations of the actual number of languages.

Of the 6809 languages which Ethnologue lists they label 750 of them as extinct or nearly extinct. Of the 300 indigenous languages to North America it is estimated that by 2050 that there will be less then 30 languages. It is estimated that overall there are 3000 endangered languages (classified as less then 2000 speakers or with a significant portion of the speakers being over 50 years old). As is evident from these numbers languages loss is very prevalent. You might be thinking at this point, I understand languages are dying but so what?

To understand the importance of the loss it is important to understand what language does for a community. A language is developed by a community over hundreds of years. Over this time the knowledge and culture is stored in the language. Every time a language is lost so is a perspective of the world. Oftentimes there are words in a language which not be translated to any other language. Whether it is a word for a plant which has yet to be classified or for a specific emotion which others could not express as well. The more perspectives we have on the world the better we can hope to understand it.

Welcome to the brand new website of Endangered-Languages.com. Though this site has existed since 2008, it is being given a minor facelift in the hopes of making it easier to maintain and reliably update.