Multilitteratus Incognitus

I posted this on my Google shared items about a month ago, but I found it so powerful that it deserves a separate posting here as well. I was reading this blog post about a researcher that was recording the language of a people. This language is going the way of the dodo so the researcher wanted to preserve it. In showing the natives what he intends to do, and giving them examples of languages no longer spoken because the last speaker of a language died, it energized the locals to probably revitalize their language. I know that I am probably losing a lot of the essence here, but for me this was quite a powerful story!

I was catching up on my Omniglot Blog unread posts and I came across this post asking people When is a language dead? This whole discussion come up because Manx was declared as a dead language even though there are still speakers of the language. The range of opinions posted in the comments was quite interesting, and it serves to point out there is not consensus on when a language is dead, or in some cases rather remains dead. View 1: A language is dead when there are are no monolingual speakers of that language. I find this line of logic to be wrong. Back when movement across country lines and continents meant long journeys, often expensive, this may have been a good indicator because a lot of people were monolingual. In these days bilingualism (or multilingualism) is the norm. In areas where there is a common language, or history of subjugation, its common to find the language of the conqueror taught first and then the native language. As we move into a more connected world, monolin...