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Article: LINGUISTS SCRAMBLE TO RESCUE WORLD'S ENDANGERED LANGUAGES.(News)
- Article from:
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer
- Article date:
- February 17, 1998
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the Dialog Corporation by Gale Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Tucked away deep in the Alaskan interior are three households where Kuskokwim is still spoken. In Oregon, two people in their 70s keep Klamath alive. And in northern Australia, about 10 native speakers of Jingulu are left.
Kuskokwim, Klamath and Jingulu are among the world's most endangered languages, having fallen victim to social and economic pressures that demand people learn more common tongues like English.
As the world becomes smaller, so does the number of viable languages. Linguists predict half of the approximately 6,000 languages spoken today will be extinct within the next century.
At Yale University, a modest effort is being made to ...