Fading tongues revived online

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This article was published 18/02/2012 (4051 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VANCOUVER — Bud Lane III is believed to be one of the last few people on the planet fluent in the aboriginal language Siletz-Dee-ni.

His language, spoken by a small aboriginal community in Oregon, is teetering on the brink of extinction.

But it has now been immortalized in Lane’s soothing voice in a “talking dictionary” — one of eight unveiled here Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lane, who spoke to a media briefing Friday by phone from Oregon, said he will never forget the day experts came to his community in the 1980s and labelled the language “morbid.” He said the community has been working ever since to revive the language.

The talking dictionaries — one from Siberia even has a smartphone app — are giving the languages unprecedented reach and, it is hoped, a better chance at survival.

The world is facing a crisis of language extinction, researchers said. Of the nearly 7,000 languages spoken today, they predict half may be gone by the end of the century.

“Linguistic diversity is one of the most important parts of our human heritage,” said David Harrison, an endangered-language expert at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, who co-leads the talking dictionaries project.

He and his colleagues said languages give invaluable insight into history, culture and how the brain functions.

Many communities are embracing technology — the Internet, YouTube, social media, text messaging — as a way to save their languages.

The Inuit in Canada’s North are, in many respects, leading the way. Microsoft programs have been translated into Inuktitut, enabling young and old to flip on their computers and communicate in their language, Leena Evic, executive director of the Pirurvik Centre for Inuit Language in Iqaluit, told the conference.

She said there are also online learning tools and a new smartphone app that now enable people “anywhere on the planet” to access Inuktitut, which is spoken by 30,000 people in the North.

“This is what I like to call the flip side of globalization,” said Harrison, pointing to the positive effects of technology now giving small languages global reach and audiences.

His team, which works with National Geographic, has been to some of Earth’s most remote corners to find the last speakers of vanishing languages.

So far, the talking dictionaries have 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages, and more than 24,000 audio recordings of native speakers pronouncing words and sentences.

Three years ago, Harrison said the team headed to a community in Papua New Guinea, where about 600 people speak a language known as Matukar Panau.

When they first arrived, the community had no electricity. But community members knew about the digital world and said they wanted their language to be on the Internet. The team helped them build a talking dictionary. A year later, the village got electricity.

“The very first time they went on the Internet, they were able to see and hear their own language spoken,” said Harrison.

It sent the very powerful message, he said, that their language “is just as good as any other. It can exist in a high-tech medium.”

— Postmedia News