A high-tech fight to save B.C.=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=99s_?=indigenous languages (fwd link)

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A high-tech fight to save B.C.’s indigenous languages

The loss of any language means the loss of human experience

BY STEPHEN HUME, VANCOUVER SUN COLUMNIST MARCH 17, 2014

Every language encompasses a unique way of seeing the world.

But humanity is faced with a crisis of linguistic extirpation. It’s
estimated than another language dies somewhere in the world every 14 days.
By the end of this century, half the world’s distinctive ways of examining
itself will have been erased.

Here in British Columbia, Simon Fraser University linguist Marianne Ignace
warns that 30 or more indigenous languages are now critically endangered.

Think of this as a kind of planetary dementia as we shed bits of our
collective knowledge, some of which is doubtless essential. Language death
represents the impoverishment of what it is to be human.

Experts call it “the silent extinction.”

Access full article below:
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Stephen+Hume+high+tech+fight+save+indigenous+languages/9628213/story.html
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