![]() ![]() The first writing systems will be devised for two of the five endangered Eurasian languages to be documented by a new DEL project directed by Alexander Nakhimovsky of Colgate University. Sealaska Heritage Institute will videotape 30 hours of narrative in Northern Haida, a language of Alaska and British Columbia that has only 14 remaining speakers. Three projects covering six languages in Russia and Alaska will receive over $800,000 in DEL grants. In this modern age of computers and our growing technological capabilities, we can preserve, assemble, analyze, and understand unprecedented riches of linguistic and cultural information."Īs part of the International Polar Year initiative, NSF is investing in the documentation and preservation of endangered languages in the Arctic, where approximately 70 percent of the spoken indigenous languages are highly endangered. Cole, "it is also a moment for enormous potential gain. "Not only is this a time of great potential loss," said NEH Chairman Bruce L. "I am pleased that researchers are responding with urgency, as well as with precision and thoroughness." "The immense diversity of linguistic data presents a unique opportunity to understand many aspects of human cognition," noted NSF Director Arden L. Seventeen endangered languages of Africa, the country recently highlighted by UNESCO as having the highest concentration of disappearing languages, will be documented under six other DEL awards. A new DEL grant will enable field workers from the University of Chicago and the Washo community itself to carry out comprehensive multimedia documentation of interviews with these last speakers. There is little by way of a dictionary or grammar for the language. They are elderly and scattered in several townships near the Nev.-Calif. No more than 20 speakers of Washo, a Native American language, remain, for example. ![]() These new DEL awards, totaling $5 million, will support digital documentation work on more than 60 such languages. Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are headed for oblivion in this century. This is the second round of their multi-year campaign to preserve records of languages threatened with extinction. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the awarding of 12 fellowships and 22 institutional grants in the two agencies' partnership on Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL). Telephone numbers or other contact information mayīe out of date please see current contact information at media This material is available primarily for archival More than half the world's 7,000 human languages are headed for oblivion.
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