NSF funds for endangered language ‘documentation’
May 6th, 2005 | by Will |The NSF just announced the Documenting Endangered Languages project — $4.4 million dollars to document about 70 languages before they go extinct, and, perhaps, to prevent their extinction.
The Ethnologue, probably the single best reference on the demographics of the world’s languages, lists 516 nearly extinct languages., including 170 in the Americas–about 7% of the 6912 ‘living languages’ the Ethnologue describes. They list 73 extinct languages in the USA.
One Response to “NSF funds for endangered language ‘documentation’”
By Matthew McDaniel on Jan 6, 2006 | Reply
Yes, it would be nice to see more funding go to this. We hear year after year that one has to be an academic and so forth to get funding, what a shame, if one knows the language they know it and there should be more funding to help record these languages and the histories the people tell.