Terralingua’s Index of Linguistic Diversity on National Geographic News Watch

 

David Braun of National Geo­graphic News Watch inter­viewed Luisa Maffi,David Har­mon, and Jonathan Loh about the new Index of Lin­guis­tic Diversity.

“For the past sev­eral years, we had been hear­ing anec­do­tal reports about endan­gered languages–how we’re los­ing lan­guages by the day, how we may lose 50–90 per­cent of lan­guages before the end of the cen­tury. But nobody had any reli­able quan­ti­ta­tive data to cor­rob­o­rate these claims,” says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and direc­tor of Ter­ralin­gua. “But now a new Index of Lin­guis­tic Diver­sity (ILD), the first of its kind, shows quan­ti­ta­tively, for the first time, what’s really hap­pen­ing with the world’s languages.”

Har­mon, of the George Wright Soci­ety/Terralingua, and Loh, of the Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Lon­don/Terralingua, are the co-authors of a paper, Index of Lin­guis­tic Diver­sity, pub­lished in the jour­nal Lan­guage Doc­u­men­ta­tion & Con­ser­va­tion, Vol­ume 4 of 2010. Their work was under­writ­ten by The Chris­tensen Fund, a non­profit which sup­ports National Geo­graphic News cov­er­age of bio­cul­tural diver­sity issues.

Braun: What is lan­guage diver­sity, and why are we poten­tially on the brink of a mass extinc­tion of languages?

To read the arti­cle visit: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2011/03/language-diversity-index-tracks-global-loss-of-mother-tongues.html