Rescue bid for languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Rescue bid for languages
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/3564267.stm

Languages threatened with extinction are being recorded and protected at
a research centre being opened in London.

A £20m donation is funding an endangered languages research project at
the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

It is claimed that out of the 6,500 languages spoken in the world about
a half are under threat of extinction.

The research centre will build a digital archive of languages that could
disappear.

The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project is claimed as the largest
research centre of its type in the world.

Disappearing languages

Peter Austin, director of the Endangered Languages Academic Project,
says that the scheme will preserve a record of many languages that are
set to disappear in the next century.

"There are languages which might have thousands of speakers, but the
communities are switching to another language - often a larger
regional, national or international language.

"This is mainly because parents think that it's an advantage to their
children, socially, economically or politically," he told BBC Radio 4's
Today programme.

The centre will train researchers in recording and documenting
threatened languages - so that there will be a way of hearing and
understanding these lost languages in the future.

This will involve the setting up of a multimedia archive of languages.

Professor Austin said that it was not inevitable that threatened
languages would disappear - as he said there was growing awareness of
the cultural loss that accompanied the death of a language.

"There are communities around the world where they are realising that
the loss of a language means the loss of their history, their culture,
their identity," he said.

And he said that the increasing number of people who said that they
could speak Welsh was a reflection of how the "tide is turning".



Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/3564267.stm

Published: 2004/03/24 12:53:08 GMT