Newsroom – California State University, Northridge

CSUN Lecture to Explore Plight of Endangered Languages

(NORTHRIDGE, Calif., Jan. 26th, 2012) ―

What if you were the last speaker of your language? What if millenniums of unique history, memory, culture and thought ended with you?

These are questions linguists Gregory Anderson and K. David Harrison will be asking people to ponder during a special lecture on Tuesday, Jan. 31, at California State University Northridge. Their presentation, “Endangered Languages: Global and Local Perspectives,” will take place at 7p.m. in the Presentation Room of the Oviatt Library located in the center of the campus at 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge.

“These men have dedicated their careers to traveling around the globe to better understand, document and revitalize dying languages,” said Debbi Mercado, who will receive her master’s in linguistics and in teaching English as a second language this spring and is president of the CSUN’s linguistics club. “Their talk will expand upon their work, travels, what they have learned and why the revitalization of these languages is so important.”

CSUN linguistics professor Evelyn McClave said their decision should be riveting.

“When a language dies, we lose crucial scientific evidence for how humans think,” McClave said. “Each language of the world has its own sound and word patterns and different ways of encoding meaning. Language diversity is decreasing as dominant languages are used by younger speakers instead of the disappearing heritage language of their parents or grandparents.”

According to the Linguistic Society of America, she said, more than half of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world will become extinct in this century. “Unlike biological extinction, we do not find remains of extinct languages that were unwritten or unrecorded, and this is why the work of linguists such as Anderson and Harrison, who are devoted to endangered languages, is so crucial,” McClave said.

Anderson is the founder and director of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the documentation, revitalization and maintenance of endangered languages. He specializes in the languages of Siberia and the tribal languages of India. He holds degrees in linguistics from Harvard and the University of Chicago. He has conducted extensive fieldwork on nearly a dozen languages and has published widely in the fields of historical linguistics, descriptive grammar, morphology and verb typology. He co-stars alongside Harrison in the Sundance documentary film “The Linguists.”

Harrison, a National Geographic Society fellow, travels around the world to interview last speakers of nearly extinct tongues. He is a leading spokesman for endangered languages and is the director of research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. He received his doctorate from Yale University, and is an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College. His published works are extensive and include the books “When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge” and “The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s’ Most Endangered Languages.” His main interest is in how languages shape the structure of human knowledge. His ethnographic research looks at indigenous knowledge, folklore, oral epics and knowledge systems.

For more information about the lecture, contact the CSUN linguistics club at linguisticsclub@my.csun.edu.

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