Saving Languages

Worries concerning the preservation of Scotland’s Gaelic language have prompted the Scottish government to provide funding for Gaelic education programs. By targeting Scotland’s youth, Gaelic supporters hope to give the endangered language a more stable future.

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The Catalan language’s difficult history of linguistic repression has made concerns about the language’s survival especially sensitive.

Catalonian lawmakers are now turning to a new medium to promote Catalan language and culture: the silver screen.

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Despite the Scottish government’s efforts to revive the Scots language in the country in recent years, a recent survey revealed that many Scottish don’t even consider Scots a distinct language.

The interesting case of the Scots language raises the question of how linguistic labels affect the relevance of a language, an important issue to consider when preserving potentially endangered languages.

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With 95 living speakers, the Onge language currently is spoken only in one settlement in the Andaman Islands union territory of India.

It’s an endangered language now, but Onge used to be a much more popular Indian language. So why is Onge endangered?

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The United Nations estimates that approximately 6,500 languages are spoken in the world today. But these dying languages are disappearing fast. By the end of this century, many linguists estimate that over half of those 6,500 languages will be gone.

The study of dying languages is late in coming, and no one knows for sure how many languages exist that have never been heard yet. Ninety-five percent of the world’s languages are spoken by only five percent of the population. So how do we find these disappearing languages? And how can we try to preserve them?

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