Storage for Dying Languages

A century from now, up to 90 percent of the world's 4,000 languages will no longer exist. That is what linguists predict based on the current rate at which languages are dying around the globe. Two Dartmouth linguistics professors, Lenore Grenoble and Lindsay Whaley, are trying to save some of what is left. Last winter they brought several scholars to Dartmouth to define the scope of the endangered languages problem. Now Grenoble and Whaley are working on one endangered linguistic species, the Manchu-Tungusic language family of northern China and Siberia. Grenoble plans to record as much of the language family as possible in Siberia, while Whaley does the same in China.

It isn't just words we lose when languages die. Grenoble's studies of the Evenk branch of Tungusic, for example, will elicit the way nomadic hunters and reindeer herders describe their worlds. "Culture is embodied in language," she explains.

Grenoble, who is training undergraduates to work with her on preserving Manchu-Tungusic, argues that the more we know about the range of languages, the more we will know about the ways human think. "We are pushing into the limits of cognition," she says. "Who knows what we've already lost?"