The Rosetta Project created this map to highlight the near-extinct languages in Africa and the Americas. They are working to update the map to include the entire world.

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Click below to view UNESCO’s interactive map of endangered languages around the world:

The blog Repeating Islands writes about Berbice Dutch, a language spoken in Guyana that was recently declared extinct:

Berbice Dutch is a mixture of the Zeeland dialect of Dutch, the local Arawak Indian language, and Ijo, which was spoken by slaves from Nigeria… The last speakers of this language were found in the 1970s by Ian Robertson, living on the upper reaches of the Berbice River in and around the area of the Wiruni Creek. The last known Berbice Dutch Creole speaker was Bertha Bell, who was 103 years old when last interviewed by Ian Robertson and a UWI linguistics research team in March, 2004. She died in 2005.

Linguist Hubert Devonish explains the dying language and interviews the last speaker of Berbice Dutch:

Listen to a BBC report on Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language, which was spoken by the Bo tribe of the Andaman islands for up to 65,000 years.

The death of an 85-year-old woman in the Andaman islands, part of India but physically closer to Indonesia, has marked the death of an entire language:

Language has become a symbol of independence in Greenland.

In recent months, Greenland has taken steps towards self-rule. The changes follow a referendum last November, in which 75 percent of the electorate voted to take more control of their own land.

Cultural identity is also highly important to Greenlanders, and Kalaallisut — or Greenlandic — is now the official language.

Jason George of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting writes that the language has become a symbol for national pride.

When Denmark gave up control of Greenland last month—ending 300+ years of colonial control—one of the first changes Greenland made was to declare Greenlandic the country’s lone national tongue.

For Greenlanders it was a point of pride to drop Danish off the list, but people here also wanted to symbolically declare that Greenlandic is central to the country’s future. They see nothing nostalgic or quaint about Kalaallisut, the most widely-spoken dialect, even if only about 55,000 people speak it.

At a popular internet café in the capital, local teenagers spend summer evenings playing computer games, chatting online in English with other gamers around the world. All Greenlandic students learn English in school and many are as comfortable with the language (and its locker room humor) as any American teen.

However amongst themselves these teens talk almost exclusively in Greenlandic, and there’s no evident pressure to ‘look cool’ by speaking English. In fact one 15-year-old gamer, Rasmus Nielsen, told us that when he moved here from Denmark 10 years ago the kids teased him about not being able to speak Greenlandic.

He learned quickly.

Of course learning a new language is easiest for kids. Professor Lenore Grenoble struggled to gain some grasp of Greenlandic before arriving here on Monday. Even with several tutoring sessions from her University of Chicago colleague Jerrold Sadock, Grenoble made little headway. “I’ve learned three phrases,” said Grenoble, who’s researching Greenland’s success at maintaining its language, despite strong outside pressures.

“It’s a very difficult language,” added Grenoble, who speaks several other languages herself, including one spoken only in the Siberian arctic.

Why’s Greenlandic so difficult?

Beyond its 10 cases, eight moods and four-person forms, Greenlandic is polysynthetic, meaning words are often made up of roots, affixes and suffixes. This quirk makes many words terribly long. In fact, some can be entire sentences, such as amaasiaarput (“They walk in a row”) and taamaaqatigiipput (“They are considered as equals.”)

Grenoble will travel today to Sisimiut, above the Arctic Circle, to begin the bulk of her work and meet with Carl Olsen, chairman of the Oqaasileriffik, the Greenland Language Secretariat. The Oqaasileriffik oversees how Greenlandic adopts new words, like qarasaasiaq for “computer” (literally “artificial brain”), and how it hopes to survive.

For the Secretariat and Greenlanders, maintaining their language is not just an issue of communication, but security and sovereignty.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user stml under a Creative Commons license.

A Hungarian schoolboy.

By 1990, it was no longer compulsory to learn Russian in Hungary. Students celebrated, no longer forced to learn the “language of oppression.” But fast-forward to 2009, and Hungary may be facing a foreign language gap — a 2004 study showed fewer Hungarians spoke second languages than almost any other country in Europe, except Britain. 

Eva S. Balogh is a Hungarian academic and blogger who writes at “Hungarian Spectrum” about the state of language education in her country. 

Learning a language in Hungary

The teaching of foreign languages in Hungarian schools is bad. Very, very bad. As far back as I can remember it was bad. Although my father in the early part of the twentieth century managed to learn German and French quite well in gymnasium, by the time I got to gymnasium it was a hopeless proposition.

Let me recount my own tortuous linguistic journey. Aside from being enrolled in a so-called German-language kindergarten where we learned no German whatsoever, I started studying French in grade five. [...] Although the parochial school I attended was run by a French order (Notre Dame), out of the four parallel classes they taught German in three and French in only one.

Our French teacher by Hungarian standards wasn’t even half bad. The fact that she was a nun stood her in good stead in mastering a foreign language. Because she majored in French she was sent by the order to a French university for a couple of years. So she could at least speak the language tolerably well. However, the class focused on reading and writing, with virtually no conversation. So after three years of French I switched to Russian. That was an interesting experience. I don’t think our teacher knew more Russian than we did. I.e. zero. She was at best a couple of lessons ahead of us. Not surprisingly we learned practically nothing by the end of the year.

[...]With the change of regime Russian was no longer a compulsory language. So students rushed to English, German, and French classes. But who were their teachers? The former Russian teachers who tried to learn English, German, or French with the same poor results as the German and French teachers who had earlier tried to learn Russian.

Today, aside from the lack of experienced teachers, the problem seems to be the same as in earlier times. Students don’t learn to communicate in a foreign language; they can neither speak nor comprehend. They are in the same boat as the Hungarian students who were trying to converse with the Russian soldiers in 1956.

Some people have tried to explain Hungarian deficiencies in learning a foreign language by pointing out that Hungarian is not an Indo-European language and therefore Hungarian speakers find it harder to learn a western language. This is hogwash. Finns manage; the percentage of Finns speaking one or two foreign languages is among the highest in Europe. Moreover, Hungarians find it easier to learn a western language than to learn Finnish whose grammatical structure is very similar to Hungarian. 

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jo Peattie under a Creative Commons license.