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According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.

This article discusses how languages in Native American communities are near being on the verge of being endangered. This article specifically mentions the Cherokee language. The cause of language disappearance is due to the government and their policies throughout history. For example, children would be beaten if they spoke their native language. The United States have went out of their way to destroy culture as a way to get rid of Native Americans. The Biden administration may have put out a draft of a 10 year plan to restore Native languages.

Ironically, native L1= English speakers are worse at delivering their message than people who speak English as a second or third language. Non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. L2=English speakers generally use more limited vocabulary and simpler expressions, without flowery language or slang. Consequently, their language tends to be shorter, clearer, and more direct. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang, references, and baffling abbreviations specific to their own culture. "The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others." When trying to communicate in English with a group of people with varying levels of fluency, it's important to be receptive and adaptable, tuning your ears into a whole range of different ways of using English, Jenkins says. "People who've learned other languages are good at doing that, but native speakers of English generally are monolingual and not very good at tuning in to language variation."

Why do writers abandon their native language? IN 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began a period of self-imposed linguistic exile from English. She stopped speaking, reading, and writing the language entirely, the better to learn Italian. I just read this book, and it was extremely interesting since I read the book in conjunction with our discussions about bilingualism in class. I highly recommend this book called In Other Words.

Why do writers abandon their native language? IN 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began a period of self-imposed linguistic exile from English. She stopped speaking, reading, and writing the language entirely, the better to learn Italian.

It has become a tradition for writers to completely abandon their native language and continue their writings in a new language. In this article Jhumpa Lahiri goes over the improvements to her writing brought about by this transition.

Yet another short article on Native Languages and their gradual course to extinction. However, the web is playing a pivotal role in Alaska in saving the native Alutiiq language.

Sweden has overtaken the Netherlands as having the best non-native English speakers. High proficiency was defined as the ability to carry out complex tasks in English. It is believed that this high proficiency is because of the high standard of language teaching in Sweden, along with subtitled media. In the eight years of testing proficiency in non-native English speaking countries, Sweden has never been below the top five.

"Non-native accents make speech somewhat more difficult for native speakers to parse and thereby reduces "cognitive fluency" - i.e., the ease with which the brain processes stimuli. And this, they found, causes people to doubt the accuracy of what is said. "...[However,] several recent studies suggest that modest disruptions of cognitive fluency - cases of cognitive "disfluency," if you will - prompt people to think critically."

This is a super interesting article + podcast/interview about the last native speakers of Hawaiian. You learn about life and language on the Island of Niihau which is something we will never get to experience. It's 30 minutes and they discuss the tensions between second language speakers and native speakers of Hawaiian, evolution versus engineering of a language, the English influence over the Hawaiian accent, and more.

This article discusses if/how language affects the way we think and the way we see through a scientific perspective.

This article reminded me of the TedTalk we watched with Lindsay Morcom because it talked about how in Russian, they describe different shades of blue in different words just like how in Indigenous language, they do the same. The article talks about how languages can change your perception of the world.

This article is about how our native language affects what we notice in our surroundings. It features the "Russian blues" theory that Russians, since they have two separate words for blue, can define blues quicker and with more accuracy than native english speakers.

It's not unusual to hear about attempts to save a disappearing language - but in one place in rural California, some Native Americans actually want their language to die out with them.

Sadly, one of the Maidu tribe members reports, "Those that know the language don't want to speak it. They associate it with difficult times. They don't want to stir up… anything." Having suffered historically at the hands of outsiders who encouraged assimilation and forgetting the native language, the Maidu are distrustful of outsiders attempting to revitalize the language.

A Bill has just recently been passed in U.S. Senate Committee that will allot money to revive languages on the verge of extinction. This was passed with the help of Brian Schatz, a Hawai'i senator. There are about 148 Native languages in our nation that are at risk of going extinct, and this bill will provide funding and awareness to support these languages through immersion schools, language classes and tribes.

The World in Words takes a trip to the Hawaiian Islands to meet some of Hawaii's native speakers on Ni`ihau. How have they managed to hold onto the language? What struggles do they face going forward? Is the variation of Hawaiian that Niihau speakers use different from the language spoken by the activists leading the Hawaiian revitalization movement, a.k.a. "university Hawaiian"?

This speech accent archive, headed by Steven Weinberger, a linguistics professor at George Mason University, is a project of the linguistics program in the Department of English, the College of Arts and Science's Technology Across the Curriculum program, and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers. This website allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech. Each individual sample page contains a sound control bar, a set of the answers to 7 demographic questions, a phonetic transcription of the sample,1 a set of the speaker's phonological generalizations, a link to a map showing the speaker's place of birth, and a link to the Ethnologue language database. The archive also contains a set of native language phonetic inventories so that you can perform some contrastive analyses.

Article talks about an adult Okinawan-language class in Hawaii. Okinawan, also known as Uchinaaguchi, is an endangered language--it fell into disuse due to Japanese colonization--hence few native speakers of the language remain. I've posted the text of the article below, as you've got to be a Star-Advertiser subscriber to see the full page: POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Aug 27, 2013 StarAdvertiser.com Learning Okinawan helps preserve culture and identity, an instructor says By Steven Mark In a classroom for preschoolers, a group of adults is trying to revive a language that is foreign to their ear but not to their heart. The language is Okinawan, or "Uchinaaguchi," as it is pronounced in the language itself. The class at Jikoen Hongwanji Mission in Kalihi, as informal as it is, might just be the beginning of a cultural revival thousands of miles to the east of the source. At least that is the hope of Eric Wada, one of the course instructors. "For us, it's the importance of connecting (language) to identity," said Wada, who studied performing arts in Okinawa and is now the artistic director of an Okinawan performing arts group, Ukwanshin Kabudan. "Without the language, you really don't have identity as a people." Okinawa is the name given to a prefecture of Japan, but it was originally the name of the main island of an archipelago known as the Ryukyu Islands that lies about midway between Japan and Taiwan in the East China Sea. For centuries, the Ryukyu kingdom maintained a degree of independence from other East Asian nations. As a result, distinctive cultural practices evolved, from graceful and meditative dance to the martial art called karate and the poetic language that sounds like a blend of Japanese and Korean. The islands were officially annexed by Japan in 1879. The 20th century saw the World War II battle of Okinawa, which claimed more than a quarter of the island's population, the subsequent placement of U.S. military bases and the return of the islands to

This article talks about when the cutoff age to learn a new language is. Studies show that youth are proficient in learning a new language until the age of 18 but if they want to understand and learn the fluency of a native speaker it is best to start by the age of 10.

Even though you're reading this article in English, there's a good chance it might not be your mother tongue. Of the billion-strong English speakers in the world, only 33% consider it their native language. The popularity of a language depends greatly on utility and geographic location. Additionally, how we measure the spread of world languages can vary greatly depending on whether you look at total speakers or native speakers. This detailed visualization from WordTips illustrates the 100 most spoken languages in the world, the number of native speakers for each language, and the origin tree that each language has branched out from. One reason these languages are popular is that they are actively and consistently used. Unfortunately, nearly 3,000 (about 40%) of all languages are at risk of being lost, or are already in the process of dying out today.

Maori is having a revival across New Zealand. Indigenous people are increasingly embracing their language, rejecting generations of stigma and shame associated with its use. And white New Zealanders are looking to Maori language and culture to help them make sense of their own cultural identity. As of 2013, just 3.7 percent of New Zealanders spoke the language fluently, and many predicted that it would soon die out. But analysts say Maori's status is shifting, and a basic knowledge of the language has come to signify cultural cool in a country that continues to wrestle with its colonial and indigenous roots. Now New Zealand's government, which says it wants more than 20 percent of the country's population to speak basic Maori by 2040, has pledged to provide Maori lessons in all New Zealand schools by 2025, despite a dearth of teachers who can speak the language.

This article talks about how the native Maori language is being revived in New Zealand. New Zealand was colonized by the British in the 19th century. Since that time, Maori language was looked down upon making it the minority language, but now with the recent rise of Maori speakers, it has started to become a common language used. This article talks about how every school is teaching Maori in their classes, and how they want Maori to be one of the dominantly spoken languages in New Zealand by 2040.

This article discusses the history of the Maori language and its progression throughout recent history. The Maori language was threatened like many other native languages in the world due to the aggression from the British. In the article shows how the people of the country are coming to terms with the past in order to build a brighter future for the native Maori culture and language.

Previously, genetic analysis had indicated that the ancestors of Native Americans left Siberia to migrate across ancient Beringia (the strip of land that once connected Asia and what's now Alaska) about 25,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence of human habitation on North America dates to 15,000 years ago. With ice covering much of Alaska, the ancestors of Native Americans might've lived in Beringia for about 10,000 years before moving on. Now linguistic evidence may help support that theory. A pair of linguistics researchers, Mark Sicoli and Gary Holton, recently analyzed languages from North American Na-Dene family (traditionally spoken in Alaska, Canada and parts of the present-day U.S.) and the Asian Yeneseian family (spoken thousands of miles away, in central Siberia), using similarities and differences between the languages to construct a language family tree. As they note in an article published today in PLOS ONE, they found that the two language families are indeed related-and both appear to descend from an ancestral language that can be traced to the Beringia region. Both Siberia and North America, it seems, were settled by the descendants of a community that lived in Beringia for some time. In other words, Sicoli says, "this makes it look like Beringia wasn't simply a bridge, but actually a homeland-a refuge, where people could build a life."