Wikitongues isn’t the only initiative working to document rare languages. Another tracked down a speaker of Ainu, a rare indigenous language in Japan that is an “ isolate,” meaning it bears no relation to any other known language. One volunteer in the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu recorded a language that had never before been studied by linguists. To get a range of tones and emotions, they’re asked to reminisce about childhood, talk about romance, and discuss their hopes and goals. Knowing they wouldn’t be able to record, or even locate, the majority of these languages themselves, Wikitongues has enlisted a network of volunteers in 40 countries to film native speakers talking in the past, present, and future tenses of their mother tongue. Even texting has helped formalize languages that don’t have a set writing system. The internet has connected rare language speakers with each other and with researchers. In 2001, more than 40 years after the last native speaker died, the language of Oklahoma’s Miami tribe started being learned by students at Miami University in Ohio. Hebrew was extinct from the fourth century BC to the 1800s, and Catalan only bloomed during a government transition in the 1970s. In rare cases, political will and a thorough written record can resurrect a lost language. ( Read about what happens when a language dies.) Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. “Would Cervantes have written the same stories had he been forced to write in a language other than Spanish? Would the music of Beyoncé be the same in a language other than English?”īetween 19, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. “When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions,” says Bogre Udell. ![]() They’ve already documented more than 350 languages, which they are tracking online, and plan to hit 1,000 in the coming years. In 2014, they launched an ambitious project to make the first public archive of every language in the world. Since he has decided to record all of them, the melting-pot metropolis is a natural launching point.īogre Udell, who speaks four languages, met Frederico Andrade, who speaks five, at the Parsons New School in New York City. There are some 800 languages spoken within the 10-mile radius of New York City, which is more than 10 percent of the world’s estimated 7,099 languages. Hearing such a rare language spoken on a residential block of Queens is not unusual for Bogre Udell, the co-founder of a nonprofit called Wikitongues. Bogre Udell sets up his camera and the siblings begin to banter in their inscrutable Germanic mother tongue. They walk past the dark wood bar of Gottscheer Hall serving pretzels and sausages, and they climb the stairs to an empty banquet room. “We’re still alive but can only remember these things.”īelay and his sister, 83-year-old Martha Hutter, have agreed to let 26-year-old Daniel Bogre Udell film them having a conversation. “Imagine if someone who plays music suddenly can’t use their fingers,” he says. ![]() Every Christmas he leads a service in his 600-year-old native language that few understand. Now, he’s one of a few thousand remaining speakers of its language, Gottscheerisch. ![]() Then, the neighborhood was filled with refugees from Gottschee, a settlement that once occupied the highlands of modern-day Slovenia. Nowadays, there are years with only a single contestant in the pageant.īelay has been coming to Gottscheer Hall since he arrived in America more than 60 years ago. “Back then you had to know the language to compete,” says 92-year-old Alfred Belay, pointing out his daughter’s beaming face from the 1980s. Inside, an entryway is covered with the saccharin smiles of “Miss Gottschee” contestants from decades past. On a residential block at the border between Brooklyn and Queens, Gottscheer Hall appears like a mirage from 1945.īlue awnings advertise the space for weddings and events.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |