Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Endangered Languages

I've gathered up a lot of resources for the Celtic languages. I'm still sorting through the resources for the Scandinavian tongues. I guess an 'Other Languages' page is coming soon, since I've finished up the basic pages for the most popular ones. The number of commercial products for these languages is woefully inadequate. I recently came across the number of languages on the planet, over 6000. Thousands of those are expected to die out in the next century. If I'm having trouble finding products to learn Irish or Swedish, both languages with millions of speakers, how can we expect to maintain interest in thousands of languages with only a handful of speakers?

There are a few online resources dedicated to documenting and preserving endangered languages. Otherlanguages is a blog dedicated to promoting awareness of endangered languages. Ogmios is an foundation for endangered languages. I recommend to anyone interested in languages to be aware of this problem and do something to contribute. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

I've always wanted to learn a Celtic language. I assumed it would be Irish, as I have some Irish ancestry, or Welsh because it fascinates me. But after becoming more aware of this endangered language problem, I've been thinking of Cornish. This language had a Near-Death Experience. It basically died, but due to a serious effort on the part of concerned citizens has seen a bit of a resurrection. There are only a few hundred fluent speakers and only a few thousand with some knowledge of it, but is still growing. Once I saw some Cornish I was kind of hooked. It looks to me as fascinating as Welsh. It will have to wait a little while for me, though. I need to iron out a few other languages before I start adding more.

The Learning Arabic page and Arabic resources page completes the most popular languages. I also added the Hebrew resource page.

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