Listening to (and Saving) the World ’sLanguages (f wd link)

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: April 28, 2010
USA

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of
Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages
in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is
said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with
descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean
and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common
in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the
only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he
learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain,
67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

Access full article below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?hp
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