Saving Languages Through Korean Soap Operas (fwd link)

[Phil Cash Cash]

Saving Languages Through Korean Soap Operas
An online-media company has teamed up with linguists to preserve endangered
tongues.
ROSE EVELETHSEP 23 2014, 10:42 AM ET

About 350,000 people in the world speak Udmurt, a language native to
eastern Russia. Nearly 50 percent
<http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/how-many-languages-are-endangered-195/> of
global languages are at risk of going extinct, and Udmurt is one of them—a
so-called “endangered language.” Preserving these languages is hard; as
communities age and disperse, and as globalization pushes younger
generations to study English, the incentives to learn an obscure, local
language diminish.

But for Udmurt speakers, there’s a new way to share the language: the movie
*Apocalypto*. A team of translators has gone through the film and subtitled
the whole thing in Udmurt. And it’s not just *Apocalypto* either—the
translation is part of a wider push to take popular television shows and
movies and leverage them in the fight against language extinction.

Access full article below:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/saving-languages-through-korean-soap-operas/380537/
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