$4.5 Million Awarded to Preserve Languages Threatened with Extinction (fwd link)

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

*$4.5 Million Awarded to Preserve Languages Threatened with Extinction*

Tuesday, August 14, 2012 :: Staff infoZine

Awards support endangered languages spoken in Asia, Africa, Australia and
the Americas.

Washington, D.C. - infoZine - The National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the award of five
fellowships, 32 institutional grants, and six doctoral dissertation
research awards totaling $4.5 million in the agencies' ongoing Documenting
Endangered Languages (DEL) program.

This is the eighth round of their campaign to document languages threatened
with extinction. Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately
7,000 currently-used human languages are bound for oblivion in this
century, and the window of opportunity for high-quality language field
documentation, they say, narrows with each passing year.

These new DEL awards will support digital documentation work on almost 30
endangered languages spoken in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas;
enhance the computational infrastructure of the field; and provide training
for the next generation of researchers.

It is important to document endangered languages for the wealth of
linguistic and cognitive information that they offer. Advances in
information technology allow for work on endangered languages that has not
previously been possible.

Access full article below:
http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/52829/
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