 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(September 2016) |
| Available in | Multilingual (7) |
|---|---|
| Founded | June 2012 [1] |
| URL | www |
| Current status | Active |
The Endangered Languages Project (ELP) is a worldwide collaboration between indigenous language organizations, linguists, institutions of higher education, and key industry partners to strengthen endangered languages. The foundation of the project is a website, which launched in June 2012. [2]
The ELP was launched in June 2012 with the intention of being a "comprehensive, up-to-date source of information on the endangered languages of the world" according to the director of the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat), Lyle Campbell, a professor of linguistics in the Mānoa College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature. He expressed that the "... Catalogue is needed to support documentation and revitalization of endangered languages, to inform the public and scholars, to aid members of groups whose languages are in peril, and to call attention to the languages most critically in need of conservation.” [1] For example, the organization classifies the Canadian Métis language Michif as critically endangered due to the declining number of its fluent speakers. [3]
There were four founding partners who oversaw the website's development and launch:
The goals of the ELP are to foster exchange of information related to at-risk languages and accelerate endangered language research and documentation, to support communities engaged in protecting or revitalizing their languages. Users of the website play an active role in putting their languages online by submitting information or samples in the form of text, audio, links or video files. [4] Once uploaded to the website, users can tag their submissions by resource category to ensure they are easily searchable. Current resource categories include:
Languages included on the website and the information displayed about them are provided by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat), developed by the linguistics departments at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Eastern Michigan University. [5] The catalogue's goal is to continuously improve. While the catalogue began with existing publications, the ELP sought out experts to fill in incomplete entries and correct any mistakes. Users that are knowledgeable about a specific language that is appropriate for the ELCat are encouraged to submit information pertaining to the improvement or submission of a particular language entry. [6] The organization's website also offers an interactive map to present the origin for these languages around the world. [7]
As of 2020, the ELP has catalogued over 3000 endangered languages in its ELCat covering 180 countries/territories throughout the world. Some of these languages include Nubi, Irish, Orok, Welsh, Swedish Sign Language, and Boruca. There are 360 endangered languages catalogued in Australia, alone. [8] The ELP states that "over 40 percent of the approximately 7,000 languages worldwide are in danger of becoming extinct." [9]
In 2018, members of the ELCat team published a book about the project, titled Cataloguing the World's Endangered Languages.> [10]
A select group of invited professionals make up the Governance Council and Advisory Committee that oversee the organization. The Governance Council currently has eleven members, including Lyle Campbell and Oliver Loode, with a wide range of experience and employment, including language research groups, universities, and Google. [11]
The active Governance Council has delegates from the United States, Canada, Australia, Estonia, Cameroon and the Netherlands. It is responsible for management of the website, oversight of outreach efforts and long-term planning for the project.
In addition to the governing organizations listed above, a global coalition of organizations working to strengthen and preserve endangered languages is forming through the website. This group is known as the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity. [12] This group partners with Google to run the Endangered Languages Project. [13]
ELP currently has two full-time staff, four part-time Language Revitalization Mentors, and four interns. The current ELP staff are from the US, Cameroon, Canada, China, India, Ireland, and Mexico. [14]
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It was first issued in 1951, and is now published by SIL International, an American evangelical Christian non-profit organization.
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead language". If no one can speak the language at all, it becomes an "extinct language". A dead language may still be studied through recordings or writings, but it is still dead or extinct unless there are fluent speakers. Although languages have always become extinct throughout human history, they are currently dying at an accelerated rate because of globalization, mass migration, cultural replacement, imperialism, neocolonialism and linguicide.
Language revitalization, also referred to as language revival or reversing language shift, is an attempt to halt or reverse the decline of a language or to revive an extinct one. Those involved can include linguists, cultural or community groups, or governments. Some argue for a distinction between language revival and language revitalization. There has only been one successful instance of a complete language revival, the Hebrew language, creating a new generation of native speakers without any pre-existing native speakers as a model.
The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa is a public land-grant research university in Mānoa, a neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawaii. It is the flagship campus of the University of Hawaiʻi system and houses the main offices of the system. Most of the campus occupies the eastern half of the mouth of Mānoa Valley, with the John A. Burns School of Medicine located adjacent to the Kakaʻako Waterfront Park.
Washo is an endangered Native American language isolate spoken by the Washo on the California–Nevada border in the drainages of the Truckee and Carson Rivers, especially around Lake Tahoe. While there are only 20 elderly native speakers of Washo, since 1994 there has been a small immersion school that has produced a number of moderately fluent younger speakers. The immersion school has since closed its doors and the language program now operates through the Cultural Resource Department for the Washoe Tribe. The language is still very much endangered; however, there has been a renaissance in the language revitalization movement as many of the students who attended the original immersion school have become teachers.
In linguistics, language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. By extension, language extinction is when the language is no longer known, including by second-language speakers, when it becomes known as an extinct language. A related term is linguicide, the death of a language from natural or political causes, and, rarely, glottophagy, the absorption or replacement of a minor language by a major language.
Hawaiʻi Sign Language, also known as Hoailona ʻŌlelo and Old Hawaiʻi Sign Language, is an indigenous sign language native to Hawaiʻi. Historical records document its presence on the islands as early as the 1820s, but HSL was not formally recognized by linguists until 2013.
Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Language documentation is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community. Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization. This record can be public or private depending on the needs of the community and the purpose of the documentation. In practice, language documentation can range from solo linguistic anthropological fieldwork to the creation of vast online archives that contain dozens of different languages, such as FirstVoices or OLAC.
Torwali is an Indo-Aryan language mainly spoken in the Bahrain and Chail areas of the Swat District in Pakistan. The language and other non-Pashtun communities are often referred to as "Kohistani" which is a name given by the Swat Pashtuns. Fredrik Barth says "The Pathans call them, and all other Muhammadans of Indian descent in the Hindu Kush valleys, Kohistanis". The Torwali language is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim communities of Swat. It is the closest modern Indo-Aryan language still spoken today to Niya, a dialect of Gāndhārī, a Middle Indo-Aryan language spoken in the ancient region of Gandhara.
Huave is a language isolate spoken by the indigenous Huave people on the Pacific coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The language is spoken in four villages on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the southeast of the state, by around 20,000 people.
The First Peoples’ Cultural Council (FPCC) is a First Nations governed Crown Corporation of the province of British Columbia, Canada. It is based in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia on Tsartlip First Nation. The organization was formerly known as the First Peoples' Heritage, Language and Culture Council, but shortened its name in 2012.
The Karuk Tribe is a federally recognized Indian tribe of Karuk people. They are an indigenous people of California, located in the northwestern corner of the state, in Humboldt and Siskiyou counties. The Karuk Tribe is one of the largest Indian tribes in California.
The LINGUIST List is an online resource for the academic field of linguistics. It was founded by Anthony Aristar in early 1990 at the University of Western Australia, and is used as a reference by the National Science Foundation in the United States. Its main and oldest feature is the premoderated electronic mailing list, with subscribers all over the world.
Claire Louise Bowern is a linguist who works with Australian Indigenous languages. She is currently a professor of linguistics at Yale University, and has a secondary appointment in the department of anthropology at Yale.
Shobhana Chelliah is an Indian-American linguist who specializes in Sino-Tibetan languages. She is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean of Research and Advancement at the College of Information, University of North Texas. Her research focuses on the documentation of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India.
The Institute on Collaborative Language Research or CoLang is a biennial training institute in language documentation for any person interested in community-based, collaborative language work. CoLang has been described as part of a modern collaborative model in community-based methodologies of language revitalization and documentation.
The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) is a major resource for information on the endangered languages of the world. It is available to the public via the Endangered Languages Project website.
Helen Aristar-Dry is an American linguist who currently serves as the series editor for SpringerBriefs in Linguistics. Most notably, from 1991 to 2013 she co-directed The LINGUIST List with Anthony Aristar. She has served as principal investigator or co-Principal Investigator on over $5,000,000 worth of research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She retired as Professor of English Language and Literature from Eastern Michigan University in 2013.
The Indigenous Language Institute (ILI) is a nonprofit organization that works to preserve and pass on language traditions within indigenous groups located in North America. The organization was founded in 1992 as the Preservation of Original Languages of the Americas (IPOLA), and it has since worked closely with various indigenous peoples, including Native Hawaiians, Alaska Natives, and indigenous citizens of both Canada and the United States. The organization seeks to create sustainable avenues for the teaching of indigenous languages, and to do so, they have created numerous forms of brochures, conducted on-site research, and catalogued many sources digitally for any indigenous group to access.