Guardian reports on Awá genocide.

In 'They're killing us': world's most endangered tribe cries for help, Gethin Chamberlain of The Observer reports on the plight of the Awá people, and the related upcoming Survival International campaign.

The article states that it is not just the removal of the forest that is threatening the Awá and their way of life, but also that "Hired gunmen – known as pistoleros – are reported to be hunting Awá who have stood in the way of land-grabbers"

Though their language is not mentioned, the number "355", given as the "number of surviving members". This corresponds well with the Ethnologue and UNESCO records of 370 and 283 speakers of Guaja speakers.

machine translation for minority languages

In Mash-up aids translation of obscure languages New Scientist describes a project from Universidad Politécnica de Valencia to extend machine translation to "minority languages".

The intent is to create translations which are "unlikely to be grammatically correct, and may contain unusual spellings, but it should be understandable to a minority language speaker" by choosing words from related languages for which machine translators are available.

The article reports on a test in which content was translated from Swedish to Spanish in this fashion, and that the authors "plan to test the system with a minority language, even though it is often hard to find native speakers to take part in experiments."

According to the article, David Yarowsky, of Johns Hopkins University says that "the rise of the internet means that languages with less than a million speakers will struggle to survive."

Even Hindi falls behind

In Wikipedia woos India with local languages , The Hindustan times reports on WikiConference India 2011.

Though the article only mentions major Indian languages, rather than any of the 197 languages of India listed in the Unesco Atlas, I thought that the following paragraph was notable in the scope of this blog.

Wales said that the Indian page editors have experienced technical complications due to the lack of digital archiving and difficulty in accessing keyboards enabled with regional script. “The number of Indian language pages on Wikipedia is very small compared to the number of people who speak the language,” said Wales. “Globally, there are more than 35,000 Wikipedians, who make at least five edits on the English page everyday. However, in terms of numbers, the Hindi page is far behind with barely 50 Wikipedians making five edits daily,” he added.

In Wikipedia, we have a major international and multilingual resource; but even Hindi, with 180 Million speakers falls way behind English, due to differences in internet penetration and a Latin bias in computer hardware.

BBC and Independent report on Andaman dictionary

In First Andaman dictionary a 'linguistic treasure trove', Alastair Lawson reports on Prof. Anvita Abbi's  forthcoming Multilingual Dictionary of Great Andamanese, containing content from Bo, Khora, Jeru, and Sare.

The article emphasises the age of the Andamanese culture and languages.  There is also a short piece of audio content, playing some Andamanese words and phrases, alongside their English equivalents

In Breathing Life into a Dying Language , The Independent also reports on the same story.  It's emphasis is on the death last year of Boa Sr, the last speaker of Bo.

Last of the Manchus

In The last of the Manchus: Et tu Manchu,The Economist reports on the decline of the Manchu language from "National Language of a vast empire" to near extinction in just a century, putting a human face on the decline in the form of Ms Zhao, one of the only two fluent speakers of Manchu in her village.  The decline turns out not to be so rapid, as 100 years ago, it wasn't as widely spoken as the opening line implies.  However, the report does raise some important points:

1. Opression can cause language loss:
• As the "language of the oppressors", the decline was accelerated by the revolution in China, when "Hundreds if not thousands of Manchu civilians" were "were massacred during the revolution by vengeful Han troops".  At the same time, many Manchu would have stopped speaking the language to avoid punishment.
2. Language death can lead to a loss of history, even in a literate society: 
• "2m out of 10m Qing documents in the country’s collection are written in Manchu."
3. Reporting on speaker numbers is difficult, the article states that Ms Zhao is one of the last two fluent speakers in her village.
• According to the article, " In 1979 there were 50 fluent speakers left"
• Ethnologue reports that there were 60 speakers in 1999,
• UNESCO Atlas gives a "compromise figure" of 10, with no date on that statistic.
4. Language revitalisation projects can be too late:
• "About six years ago Sanjiazi set up the country’s first Manchu school. But Ms Zhao does not think this will make much difference. The Manchu teachers, she says, do not understand her Manchu"

ELA on Today Programme

This morning's Today Programme, on BBC Radio 4, included an item on the Endangered Language Alliance.  The report stated that they are mostly working with the New York members of various diasporas, and included  interviews with speakers of three minority languages, Nahuatl, Shugni, and Circassian.

The brief summary given in the online timeline is:

"It is estimated that world languages are dying out at the rate of one every fortnight. This statistic has prompted a small group of linguists in New York to form the Endangered Language Alliance. Our reporter Matt Wells visited them at their field station in the middle of Manhattan, to see how they are trying to preserve minority voices from disappearing."

Programme: Avoiding Language Extinction

All words in Ninde start with N

In An Idiot Abroad, Series 2 Episode 1, "Desert Island", the protagonist spends a night alone on a small island in Vanuatu, after meeting with the residents of a nearby island for some instruction and cultural background.

The locals speak Ninde.  It is implied that all Ninde words begin with n, and a joke is made that games of I-Spy must be boring.

He also visits other communities in Vanuatu, (the Yaohnanen, and a community that practices Land Diving), but nothing is said about language there.