Saturday, February 18, 2012

Digital Collection 'to Save Languages'

Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the shelter of many of the world's involved languages, scientists believe.

Of the 7,000 or so languages oral on Earth today, about half are approaching to be archaic by the century's end.

Globalisation is often blamed, but a few elements of the "modern world", primarily digital technology, are pulling back against the tide.

North American tribes use amicable media to re-engage their young, for example.

Tuvan, an native tongue oral by winding peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to learn the diction of difference to new students.

"Small languages are using amicable media, YouTube, content messaging and assorted technologies to spread their voice and spread their presence," mentioned K David Harrison, an friend highbrow of linguistics at Swarthmore College and a National Geographic Fellow.

"It's what we similar to to call the flipside of globalisation. We listen to a lot about how globalisation exerts disastrous pressures on tiny cultures to assimilate. But a certain outcome of globalisation is that you can have a denunciation that is oral by only 5 or 50 people in one remote location, and right away by digital technology that denunciation can accomplish a universal voice and a universal audience."

Harrison, who travels the world to look for out the final speakers of declining languages, has been describing his work here at the annual discussion of the American Association is to Advancement of Science (AAAS).

With National Geographic, he has only helped create 8 conversing dictionaries.

These dictionaries enclose more than 32,000 word entries in 8 involved languages. All the audio recordings have been done by native speakers, a few of whom similar to Alfred "Bud" Lane are amid the final smooth people in their native tongues.

Mr Lane speaks a denunciation well known as Siletz Dee-ni, that is limited to a tiny area on the middle Oregon coast.

"Linguists came in and marked down our denunciation moribund, meaning it was streamer is to charcoal mass of history; and our genealogical people and our legislature motionless that wasn't going to happen. So we devised a outline to go deliver to beginning training our chapter here in the Siletz Valley," he told the meeting.

Mr Lane has sat down and available 14,000 difference is to online compendium . "Nothing takes the place of speakers vocalization to other speakers, but this bridges a hole that was only sorely indispensable in our residents and our tribe."

Margaret Noori is an consultant in Native American studies at the University of Michigan and a orator of Anishinaabemowin, that is the emperor denunciation of over 200 native "nations" in Canada and the US. These communities are complicated users of Facebook .

"What we do with technology is try to link up people," Prof Noori said. "All of it is to keep the language."

Dr Harrison says not all languages can survive, and many fundamentally will be mislaid as outstanding speakers die off. But he says the new digital collection do offer a way back from the margin for a lot of languages that seemed cursed only a few years ago.

He told BBC News: "Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the frigid ice caps, the not similar ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this ability is encoded in human cultures and languages, since only a tiny fragment of it is encoded in the systematic literature.

"If we caring about sustainability and presence on the planet, we all gain from having this ability bottom persevered."

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter

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