museum exhibit: endangered languages

[Christian Chiarcos]

Dear Lena, dear all,

I am glad that many of you liked the tree metaphor, and I'm happy that it  
helped to give the entire discussion a somewhat more constructive tone.  
Personally, I find other metaphors equally valid (even the coffin, and the  
phoenix -- although the latter may be somewhat too complex for children at  
small age). For me, the coffin with "linguistic diversity" on it would be  
somewhat less offensive, and you could combine it with a globe where the  
nations of the world are color-coded for, say, their endangered languages  
per square kilometer to make clear that it is a problem on a global scale.  
Alternatively, you can generate a map of endangered languages from  
http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/

But regardless of the metaphor you eventually adopt, some ideas on a few  
specific points you raised:

- If you have difficulties to classify languages as being endangered, just  
take a pragmatic approach and follow a standard reference such as  
http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/. Their classification may  
not necessarily be correct, but you don't have to decide by yourself and  
can redirect all criticism directly to the authors.

- Coming back to "Collecting words of different languages for the same  
concept/object also came to my mind in the first place", you might  
consider using existing Swadesh lists such as  
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?root=new100. Again, their data  
is far from being perfect (and it's not authoritative, in this case), but  
you're on safe ground by using data produced by the scientific community.  
However, AFAIK, there are no audio Swadesh lists available.

> Imagine a language is learnt by children, yet there is only a small  
> number of speakers, no educational material and pressure from a "bigger"  
> language, where should I put the language?

- You don't have to provide a classification of all languages and in your  
context, no one really expects you to, but you can concentrate on  
representative examples. No need for exhaustivity. If you look for  
prototypically "healthy" languages, you might adopt, for example, the  
criterion whether your audience has first-hand experience on them (that's  
why I was suggesting German and Turkish). The point is that you employ a  
verifiable, objective criterion (the number of speakers would be another  
one) from an authoritative source or common knowledge. In this way, any  
argument about your classification decision should vanish immediately.  
Maybe, people won't agree, but then, they obviously don't share your  
definition, and it's a comparison of applies and pies. To be on the safe  
side, you can add a pointer to a website on language documentation where  
the problem and its complexity are described in detail. I'm sure people on  
the list have suggestions for such a link.

- I also don't think that it is a good idea to provide a gradual scale (at  
least not one based on intuition, if you just take the number of speakers,  
then it should be fine), and in particular, it won't help to distinguish  
languages that are highly endangered and some that are more in between.  
There will certainly be a lot of disagreement even on the state and the  
future of large national languages. Recently, the future of German is  
controversially discussed again, for example: you might take a look on  
http://www.heute.de/Sprachpanscher-des-Jahres-Der-Duden-29564858.html for  
some more or less unjustified controversies. Hence, distinguishing  
perishing languages and endangered languages would probably not be a good  
idea. What I was suggesting with the perishing tree (or, more precisely,  
the treestump) was to enumerate some languages that are lost beyond  
reconstructability and for which no substantial record, or no record at  
all is preserved.

> The pictures of hope that some of you want to paint are certainly very  
> beautiful and they are appropriate if people already know about language  
> endangerment. But this is not the case for the general public in  
> Germany. Hope? Yes. But what for?

- Actually, people might know about the disappearence of dialects in  
Germany. Maybe not so much in Saxony, but  
http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/ lists 13 languages  
vulnerable or endangered in (or originating from) Germany alone.

- Whatever you do, part of the message should probably be that the loss of  
linguistic diversity is inseparable from the loss of cultural diversity  
(or, a symptom at least). Something that I found truly impressing (being a  
linguist myself) is how different the world is categorized in different  
languages. With every language we loose, a system of metaphors vanishes  
that might have held the key for better understanding the world (or, at  
least, understanding it in a different way). Lera Boroditsky, psychologist  
at Stanford University, has given a great keynote on this at ACL-2010  
(also cf.  
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/press/SuddeutscheZeitung.pdf). A nice  
discussion on a few such aspects, and a source of inspiration may be  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYlVJlmjLEc.

All the best, good luck with the exhibition, and thank you for the  
initiative,
Christian
-- 
Christian Chiarcos
Applied Computational Linguistics
Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 10, #401b
mail: chiarcos at informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
web: http://acoli.cs.uni-frankfurt.de
tel: +49-(0)69-798-22463
fax: +49-(0)69-798-28931