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For centuries, Central America's Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people have kept the culture's oral history alive through their ancestors' native language. But decades of modernization, haphazard native-language training in Garifuna schools, intermarriage between cultures, and the ridicule of young people who speak the language, collectively led to Garifuna being listed on the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages in 2001. Today, linguists estimate that about 100,000 speakers remain. The threat of language extinction isn't new. Some linguists estimate a language dies every two weeks, as some languages become dominant tools for social and economic exchange, while others are pushed to the margins. But there are ways to save at-risk languages, as well. The key is that the language needs to be thought of less as preserved, "but indeed part of their present and their future," says Liliana Sánchez, a linguist and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That's exactly what the Garinagu (Garifuna people) are doing. For the past two decades, Garifuna artists have used a cultural cornerstone-spirited dance music-to inspire young Garinagu to learn and share their native language. Now, with a new Garifuna Tourism Trail project in Belize, travelers can experience and support the cultural renaissance, too. Elements of the Garifuna culture-including music, dance, and language-were listed as a UNESCO Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Around that same time, Garifuna musicians and cultural activists hatched a plan: Create irresistible melodies, sung entirely in Garifuna, to rally young Garinagu to embrace the culture and learn the language. Will music save the Garifuna language? Time will tell. Garifuna remains on UNESCO's endangered-language list, last updated in 2010. And, as the Hawaiians learned from revitalizing their own language post colonization, this kind of revival is a long, multi-generational road.

Google is working together with trusted organizations to help stop the disappearance of languages. The Endangered Languages Project is an online space designed for speakers of endangered languages and those passionate about their preservation.

Of the 7,105 languages spoken today, over half are considered in danger of extinction in this century. As languages vanish, communities lose a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment and the human mind. This will be a catastrophic erosion of the human knowledge base, affecting all fields of science, art, and human endeavor. It will also be an incalculable loss to indigenous peoples' sense of history, identity, belonging, and self. The story map embedded in this website will take you on a virtual tour of some endangered language communities around the world, to see and hear some of the last speakers, and understand their struggle to save their languages.

Some linguists estimate that roughly half of the world's 7,000 or so languages are on the verge of extinction. The UK-based startup Tribalingual is trying to prevent those types of sociolinguistic losses, offering classes that connect students with some of the few remaining speakers of endangered languages.

Although a densely academic article, Professor Patrick Heinrich of the University of Venice, discusses the history of colonization in Okinawa and its detrimental effect on the indigenous languages of the region. The Ryūkyūans are a group of indigenous peoples living in the Ryūkyū archipelago, which stretches southwest of the main Japanese island of Kyūshū towards Taiwan. The largest and most populated island of the archipelago, Okinawa Island, is actually closer to Manila, Taipei, Shanghai and Seoul than it is to Tokyo. Though considered by the Japanese as speaking a dialect, the Ryūkyūans speak separate languages such as Okinawan, also known as Uchinaguchi, as well as Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni. All are part of the Japonic language family, to which the Japanese language also belongs, and all are recognized as endangered languages by UNESCO. Language reclamation in the contemporary Ryukyus departs from a keen awareness that language loss is bigger than language itself. Activists know that losing a language entails the loss of an entire world of symbolic representations, and therefore, of how to place oneself in the world. Concepts of self, society, and place change when one language is replaced by another (Guay 2023). Language loss is no trivial loss. Language loss and the sociocultural displacement accompanying it are responsible for many problems in endangered speech communities worldwide, including those in Japan. Endangered language communities like the Ryukyuans and the Ainu are more likely than the majority Japanese to suffer from prejudice, poverty, spiritual disconnectedness from their heritage culture, family instability, or difficulties to climb the social ladder (see Onai 2011). Language loss also causes a weakening of cultural autonomy. It becomes more difficult to support the community's self-image if majority languages are adopted (Heinrich and Ishihara 2018). Language reclamation addresses these problems and in so doing contribut

The UN Atlas of Endangered Languages lists 18 languages with only one remaining speaker. With about one language disappearing every two weeks, some of these have probably already died off. The following 18 languages were last known to have one remaining speaker.

"The researchers first looked at hot spots-locations with an exceptionally high number of unique species that also has a loss of habitat of 70 percent or more. ... In these 35 hotspots-spread throughout the world's continents with the exception of Antarctica-the researchers found 3,202 languages-nearly half of all languages spoken on Earth. ... It's unclear why areas of endangered species concentration and endangered languages coexist. ... The study is a starting point to explore the relationship between biological and linguistic-cultural diversity."

"Christian missionaries have become strangely vital to conserving endangered languages... In 1951 Pittman had started interviewing missionaries and linguists about the languages that were spoken in the parts of the world where they worked. The result was a language catalogue called Ethnologue... For example, the Spanish priests who followed the conquistadors into South America documented indigenous languages as they went."

"For years, the Web's lingua franca was English. ... For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has [now] become a lifeline. ... Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a language is being able to use it in everyday life. ... Though most of the world's languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells of traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck driver who devised his own system for writing the endangered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. ... Africa is the world's fastest-growing cellphone market. Texting allows farmers to check crop prices. ... for hundreds of heritage languages, a four-inch bar of plastic and battery and motherboard is the future of the past."

Many languages are endangered. Braille and sign language may be next. Technological advancements have decreased demand for these once revolutionary aids.

Article discusses the importance of preserving endangered indigenous languages: it's not only the languages at risk but also the world views they express - tens of thousands of years of accumulated ecological, biological and cultural knowledge. "Every last word means another lost world," is how the Living Tongue Institute for Endangered Languages puts it.

Linguists are learning that climate change is another major factor contributing to the threat of language loss. This article dives into the effects of climate change on endangered languages such as Greenlandic and Marshallese, and explores how communities are taking action to protect their indigenous languages.

This site is a link for the online edition of all languages that are in danger of becoming extinct or are extinct from 1950. It provides us with a rating of how much a language is endangered. Link to the online guide: http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas

"Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end. ... Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students. 'It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation' [said K David Harrison] ... 'Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.'"

"Herrera also discovered teens in the Phillippines and Mexico who think it's "cool" to send text messages in regional endangered languages like Kapampangan and Huave."

Love this!~

JRR Tolkien's classic, _The Hobbit_, is about to be issued in `ōlelo Hawai`i, thanks to the work of translator, Keao NeSmith. Hawaiian is one of the most endangered of the Polynesian languages. It's hoped that "Ka Hopita" will legitimize Hawaiian as an everyday language and boost the efforts of a new generation of Hawaiian speakers. "Ka Hopita," which is set to be published on March 25 (a date important to Tolkien fans because it's the day that Bilbo Baggins came home from his adventures), is the first Tolkien novel to appear in an indigenous language of the United States.

Jack Hitt article on how languages die and efforts to keep them alive; notes estimate that half of more than 6,000 languages currently spoken in world will become extinct by end of century; says working to stem tide range are graduate students heading into the field to compile dictionaries, charitable foundations devoted to the cause, like Endangered Language Fund, and transnational agencies, like European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages; describes scene in Puerto Eden, tiny fishing village on Wellington Island in Patagonia region of southern Chile, home of last six speakers of Kawesqar, language native to area since last ice age; photos (L)

Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world's languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century. Wikitongues wants to save these endangered languages from extinction. Bogre Udell, who speaks four languages, met Frederico Andrade, who speaks five, at the Parsons New School in New York City. In 2014, they launched Wikitongues, an ambitious project to make the first public archive of every language in the world. They've already documented more than 350 languages, which they are tracking online, and plan to hit 1,000 in the coming years. "When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions," says Bogre Udell.

In the village of Antia in Greece, there is a whistled language called Sfyria. Sfyria is a whistled version of the Greek language, with different whistled tones representing Greek letters and sounds. The main benefit of Sfyria is communication over long distances. Sound from whistling travels ten times farther than from shouting. Sfyria is one of the most endangered languages in the world. Only six people can still speak and understand it.

Such a fascinating article about an obscure language, Sean! The article also notes that Sfyria is also not the only whistled language--worldwide, there are 70 other whistled languages in the world. Wild.