Tag Archives: living tongues

Endangered Language Activism

How to Help Living Tongues

First of all, we would like to thank all of our donors who generously contributed to our programs this year! We truly appreciate your support. We rely solely on the generosity of donors and grants to fund our field expeditions, publications, and assistance to indigenous communities struggling for cultural and linguistic survival.

Click here to donate to Living Tongues’ Adopt-a-Language program.

All human languages are tools of creativity and webs of knowledge. Every two weeks, the last fluent speaker of an endangered language passes on. In this critical time, help us document and maintain these languages so that future generations may speak them. Please consider Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, when planning your charitable giving.

Living Tongues has many ongoing documentation projects currently taking place around the world. We need your help to sustain these projects. Our mission is to record vanishing languages as well as create state-of-the-art digital audio-visual materials in collaboration with speakers of endangered languages.

The languages we are currently focusing on are listed here. In choosing a language to support, you are helping linguists and language activists document, conserve and maintain a language. You are also helping future generations gain access to printed materials or online resources produced in their own language. Your generous donation will go towards:

  • Multi-media educational materials such as videos and Talking Dictionaries,
  • Digital databases containing maps, recordings of oral history and endangered knowledge systems,
  • Scientific reference grammars,
  • Traditional pedagogical materials such as ABC books, children’s readers and translated texts,
  • Informational videos and booklets,
  • Fieldtrips for linguists to work with local language activists,
  • Language Technology Kits for endangered language speakers.

Click here to donate to Living Tongues’ Adopt-a-Language program.

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Endangered Language Activism

Living Tongues featured in Al Jazeera article on India’s endangered languages

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Thanks to Bijoyeta Das from Al Jazeera English for interviewing us for this article about India’s endangered languages and the use of social media to help revive them.

“Communities abandon languages when they internalise the negative values connected to their identities, says Greg Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. “Language endangerment is almost always the result of discrimination and bias. Technology levels the playing field,” he says. “But there is no quick fix,” he cautions.

[…] Anderson and K David Harrison launched eight online talking dictionaries as part of the Enduring Voices Project by National Geographic Society and Living Tongues Institute. These dictionaries contain more than 32,000 word entries, and include Ho and Remo of India.”

Read the whole article here.

Endangered Language Activism

Indigenous Languages Panel @ Canadian Festival of Spoken Word

This panel took place at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word on Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) territory at the MAI in Montreal, Quebec, on Nov. 9th 2013. It featured distinguished indigenous language activists, poets and scholars. They drew from First Nations oral traditions, spoken word and linguistics to discuss and celebrate indigenous languages in Canada. Panelists explored current threats that their languages face, and presented examples of community education initiatives that are underway to stop language extinction by engaging new generations of speakers. Among many topics, oral transmission, writing systems, phonetics, digital art forms and new media were discussed.

We wish to extend a big thank you to everyone involved in this event! Thank you to the MAI, to the Festival, and to the Festival Director Moe Clark, to everyone who attended, and to everyone who gave presentations. We would like to emphasize how amazing it was to hear all of the panelists’ stories. It is so important to hear about their experiences and approaches to language conservation and revitalization directly from the language warriors themselves. Miigwech.

ImageFrom left to right: Melody McKiver (Anishnaabe), Vera Wabegijig (Anishnaabe), Anna Luisa Daigneault (Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages), Jacques Newashish (Atikamekw). Photo by Leonor Daigneault.

ImageIndigenous Languages: Heritage and Spirits / Langues autochtones: patrimoine et esprit. Photo by Leonor Daigneault.

 

ImageFrom left to right: Chelsea Vowel (Plains Cree), Kahtehrón:ni Iris Stacey (Mohawk), Leith Mahkewa (Oneida / Hopi / Mohawk), Manon Tremblay (Muskeg Lake Cree), Louise Halfe Sky Dancer (Cree). Photo by Leonor Daigneault.

 

For more details on this panel, and for bios on all of the participants, please see our event page:

http://livingtongues.wordpress.com/canadian_festival2013/

 

Miigwech!

Endangered Language Activism, Enduring Voices Project, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Indigenous Language Activists, K. David Harrison, Language Hotspots, Launches and Public Events, Media and Publicity, Support Endangered Languages

Endangered Languages and Cultural Heritage at the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival

One World, Many Voices

Of the nearly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today—many of them unrecorded—up to half may disappear in this century. As languages vanish, communities lose a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human mind.

 

The One World, Many Voices: Endangered Languages and Cultural Heritage program at the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival will highlight language diversity as a vital part of our human heritage. Cultural experts from communities around the world will demonstrate how their ancestral tongues embody cultural knowledge, identity, values, technologies, and arts.

Through performances, craft demonstrations, interactive discussion sessions, community celebrations, and hands-on educational activities, highly skilled musicians, storytellers, singers, dancers, craftspeople, language educators, and other cultural practitioners will come together on the National Mall to share their artistry, knowledge, and traditions; to discuss the meaning and value of their languages to their cultural heritage and ways of life; and to address the challenges they face in maintaining the vitality of their languages in today’s world.

ImageFestival visitors will be able to talk with Kalmyk epic singers and Tuvan stone carvers from Russia, Koro rice farmers from India, Passamaquoddy basketmakers from Maine, Kallawaya medicinal healers and textile artists from Bolivia, Garifuna drummers and dancers from Los Angeles and New York, and many others.

When a language disappears, unique ways of knowing, understanding, and experiencing the world are lost forever. The expert culture bearers participating in the One World, Many Voices program will richly illustrate these different ways of knowing and show how cultural and language diversity enrich the world.

The One World, Many Voices program is produced by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in collaboration with UNESCO, the National Geographic Society’s Enduring Voices Project, and the Smithsonian’s Recovering Voices Initiative.

2013 Festival Schedule

47th Annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall,

Washington D.C., USA.

June 26-June 30 and July 3-July 7, 2013

Open daily 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Evening events 5:30 p.m.

A full schedule will be available in June 2013.

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