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UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger is intended to raise awareness about language endangerment and the need to safeguard the world's linguistic diversity among policy-makers, speaker communities and the general public, and to be a tool to monitor the status of endangered languages and the trends in linguistic diversity at the global level. The latest edition of the Atlas (2009) lists about 2,500 languages (among which 230 languages extinct since 1950), approaching the generally-accepted estimate of some 3,000 endangered languages worldwide. For each language, the Atlas provides its name, degree of endangerment (see below) and the country or countries where it is spoken. The online edition provides additional information on numbers of speakers, relevant policies and projects, sources, ISO codes and geographic coordinates. This free Internet-based version of the Atlas for the first time permits wide accessibility and allows for interactivity and timely updating of information, based on feedback provided by users.

Connecting you with the world's diverse cultures is this KML layer produced by The Rosetta Project / The Long Now Foundation. Around the world, a significant part of cultural diversity is experienced through language. It is feared that many of the languages, and therefore the cultures they belong to are being lost at such a rapid rate that "linguists predict that we may lose as much as 90% of the world's linguistic diversity within the next century." This KML provides an opportunity to explore the areas where these endangered languages are spoken throughout Africa and the Americas.

Submission Deadline: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 Acceptance Notification: Early October Abstracts are invited from undergraduate and graduate students for 15-minute presentations including, but not limited to, relationships between and among language, linguistics, and their many applications: * American Sign Language * natural and artificial languages * extinct and endangered languages * speech pathology and hearing sciences * language and cognition * theoretical and applied linguistics * structural, semantic, or phonological analyses * comparative grammars * discourse/text analysis * applications in rhetoric, the arts, and the humanities * applications in academic, cultural, and sociological constructs

E-MELD is a 5-year project with a dual objective: 1) To aid in the preservation of endangered languages data and documentation. 2) To aid in the development of the infrastructure necessary for effective collaboration among electronic archives.

Building an archive of all documented human languages.