Languages Alive

This festschrift volume, published in honor of Jürgen Dassow on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 19 contributions by leading researchers, colleagues, and friends. Covering topics on picture languages, cooperating distributed systems of automata, quantum automata, grammar systems, online computation, word equations, biologically motivated formal systems, controlled derivations, descriptional complexity, as well as 'classical' topics of automata and language theory, the articles presented span the range of the scientific work of Jürgen Dassow.

Explores current efforts to record, collect and archive endangered languages which are in danger of falling silent.

Many of the world's languages have diminishing numbers of speakers and are in danger of falling silent. Around the globe, a large body of linguists are collaborating with members of indigenous communities to keep these languages alive. Mindful that their work will be used by future speech communities to learn, teach and revitalise their languages, scholars face new challenges in the way they gather materials and in the way they present their findings. This volume discusses current efforts to record, collect and archive endangered languages in traditional and new media that will support future language learners and speakers. Chapters are written by academics working in the field of language endangerment and also by indigenous people working 'at the coalface' of language support and maintenance. Keeping Languages Alive is a must-read for researchers in language documentation, language typology and linguistic anthropology.

Do you want to learn the language of your ancestors? Do you want to help save an endangered language? Do you know someone who speaks another language and could help you learn it? If the answer to any or all of these questions is "yes," this book can help. Amidst an epidemic of worldwide language loss, author Leanne Hinton and a group of dedicated language activists have created a master-apprentice program, a one-on-one approach to ensure that new speakers will take the place of those who are fluent in the world's languages. The Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program originated among the indigenous tribes of California, but this is a manual for students of all languages, from Yurok to Yiddish, Washoe to Welsh. Here is a simple, structured series of exercises and activities designed to help you take advantage of the language-learning skills shared by all humans, along with advice to students and their mentors about how to succeed.--From publisher description.

What is the future of languages in an increasingly globalized world? Are we moving toward the use of a single language for global communication, or are there ways of managing language diversity at the international level? Can we, or should we, maintain a balance between the global need to communicate and the maintenance of local and regional identities and cultures? What is the role of education, of language rights, of language equality in this volatile global linguistic mix? A group of leading scholars in sociolinguistics and language policy examines trends in language use across the world to find answers to these questions and to make predictions about likely outcomes. Highlighted in the discussion are, among other issues, the rapidly changing role of English, the equally rapid decline and death of small languages, the future of the major European languages, the international use of constructed languages like Esperanto, and, not least, the question of what role applied scholarship can and should play in mapping and influencing the future.

A clarion call to action, incorporating powerful stories of failure and success, that points the way for all who seek to preserve indigenous languages.

Presents an overview of the living, endangered, and extinct languages of the world, providing the total number of speakers of the language, its history, and maps of the geographic areas where it is presently spoken or where it was spoken in the past.