Endangered Languages, Endangered Cultures

At the 2000 World Forum on Early Care and Education in Singapore, Andrew Ikupu talked about ambitious efforts being made in his home country, Papua New Guinea, to preserve the nation's 800+ indigenous languages. Andrew related how he would go into a village and work with the elders to build a school out of materials available in the surrounding environment and to recruit and train someone from that community to teach young children in their indigenous language. Community members, proud of the school they had built, made sure the school and its teacher were successful.

Now a report from UNESCO on endangered languages reports that the work Andrew was involved in is paying fruits: "Papua New Guinea, the country which has the greatest linguistic diversity on the planet (more than 800 languages are believed to be spoken there), also has relatively few endangered languages (88)."

The report, Endangered Languages, Endangered Thought, observes that around the world, efforts to preserve languages are not always so successful.

With the death of Marie Smith Jones, the Eyak language of Alaska (United States) died out last year and Ubykh (Turkey) vanished in 1992 with the demise of Tevfik Esenç. Out of the approximately 6,000 existing languages in the world, more than 200 have become extinct during the last three generations, 538 are critically endangered, 502 severely endangered, 632 definitely endangered and 607 unsafe, according to the new edition of the “UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger”. For example, the Atlas states that 199 languages have fewer than ten speakers and 178 others have 10 to 50.

As UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura stressed, “The death of a language leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral expressions of the community that spoke it — from poems and legends to proverbs and jokes. The loss of languages is also detrimental to humanity’s grasp of biodiversity, as they transmit much knowledge about the nature and the universe.”

Three months before the 2009 World Forum on Early Care and Education, it has sold out.  We have over 600 delegates from 78 countries!  However, from our experience with the previous seven World Forums, there will be a number of cancellations for a variety of reasons. Therefore, if you still are eager to attend, we urge you to sign up on our online waiting list as soon as possible.  When positions open up, individuals on the waiting list will be invited to register on a first-come first-served basis.

Through the EverydayTLC Early Childhood Institute program, you can earn 40 clock hours towards your CDA certificate. Affordable and convenient, too! All tests are reviewed by a CDA approved advisor.

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