LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS: RESEARCH: NSF, NEH Boost Efforts to Make Digital Records of Dying Languages NSF, NEH Boost Efforts to Make Digital Records of Dying Languages More than half of 7,000 current languages at risk of disappearing Public release date: 10-Jul-2006 Eureka Alert <http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/nsf-nnb071006.php> The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the awarding of 12 fellowships and 22 institutional grants in the two agencies' partnership on Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL). This is the second round of their multi-year campaign to preserve records of languages threatened with extinction. Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are headed for oblivion in this century. These new DEL awards, totaling $5 million, will support digital documentation work on more than 60 such languages. No more than 20 speakers of Washo, a Native American language, remain, for example. They are elderly and scattered in several townships near the Nev.-Calif. border. There is little by way of a dictionary or grammar for the language. A new DEL grant will enable field workers from the University of Chicago and the Washo community itself to carry out comprehensive multimedia documentation of interviews with these last speakers. Seventeen endangered languages of Africa, the country recently highlighted by UNESCO as having the highest concentration of disappearing languages, will be documented under six other DEL awards. "The immense diversity of linguistic data presents a unique opportunity to understand many aspects of human cognition," noted NSF Director Arden L. Bement, Jr. "I am pleased that researchers are responding with urgency, as well as with precision and thoroughness." "Not only is this a time of great potential loss," said NEH Chairman Bruce L. Cole, "it is also a moment for enormous potential gain. In this modern age of computers and our growing technological capabilities, we can preserve, assemble, analyze, and understand unprecedented riches of linguistic and cultural information." As part of the International Polar Year initiative, NSF is investing in the documentation and preservation of endangered languages in the Arctic, where approximately 70 percent of the spoken indigenous languages are highly endangered. Three projects covering six languages in Russia and Alaska will receive over $800,000 in DEL grants. Sealaska Heritage Institute will videotape 30 hours of narrative in Northern Haida, a language of Alaska and British Columbia that has only 14 remaining speakers. The first writing systems will be devised for two of the five endangered Eurasian languages to be documented by a new DEL project directed by Alexander Nakhimovsky of Colgate University. One new DEL grant to the University of Texas at Austin will enable the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) to digitize and archive eight major collections of materials from prominent researchers on indigenous languages of Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil. A DEL fellowship will support Jeffrey Davis of the University of Tennessee in digitizing, translating, and assessing 19th century materials in the once widely used Plains Indian Sign Language that are housed at the Smithsonian Institution. ---------------------------------------- The complete press release may be read at the URL above. Sincerely, David Dillard Temple University (215) 204 - 4584 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Net-Gold <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/net-gold> <http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html> General Internet & Print Resources <http://library.temple.edu/articles/subject_guides/general.jsp> <http://www.learningis4everyone.org/> <http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ringleaders/davidd.html> Digital Divide Network <http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/jwne> Educator-Gold <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Educator-Gold/> _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
