Endangered languages: why it matters | Mandana Seyfeddinipur | TEDxLSHTM
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- Опубликовано: 22 май 2024
- It is estimated that there are 7,000 languages spoken in the world today with 50% of the world’s population speaking 50 languages and the other 50% speaking 6,950 languages. Mandana Seyfeddinipur explains how globalization, climate change, urbanization and political unrest are causing the extinction of languages at a rate equivalent to the loss of biological diversity during the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and how this negatively impacts cultural diversity and decreases social resilience.
Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a linguist and the director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS University of London. The programme supports the documentation of endangered languages world wide. Of the approximately 7000 languages spoken today half will have fallen silent by the end of this century. Humanity is losing its linguistic diversity and these unwritten languages are vanishing without a trace. In her work she focuses on the documentation of these languages and the knowledge encoded within them. A specialist in language use and multimodality she supports and trains scholars in how to create multi-media collection of endangered languages documenting the knowledge of our human cultural heritage encoded in language.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at ted.com/tedx
“Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent.” ― Ariel Sabar
I found you everywhere
Pls check our vlog SAVE OUR BUTUANON LANGUAGE AND LEAVE US A COMMENT. SALAMAT KADIYAO!
This was so awesome!! I'm so fascinated by language.
I'm a Russian who learns Mansi(closest language to Khanty and Hungarian btw) and literally speaks it better than 90% of the Mansi themselves(a little more than 10 000 Mansis vs less than 1000 Mansi speakers). Besides, I have a Mansi friend and he hasn't anyone but me to talk to in his native language. All that is kinda ironic and sad at the same time.
Pls check our vlog SAVE OUR BUTUANON LANGUAGE AND LEAVE US A COMMENT. SALAMAT KADIYAO!
I think I once heard that a Mansi kindergarten got in trouble for having their motto in Mansi raised higher than their motto in Russia, and the government wasn't happy about that...
Afarin! An excellent presentation. Not only does it convey the predicament of the human world - briefly and poignantly, as we lose our languages, one by one - but it also inspires us linguists to redouble our efforts, not least to think what can be done with a language archive.
Afarin?
Pls check our vlog SAVE OUR BUTUANON LANGUAGE AND LEAVE US A COMMENT. SALAMAT KADIYAO!
What most of the talks about languages don’t go into in any depth is that languages contain very complex cultural views of life which cannot necessarily be translated. For example, the languages of native peoples of the Americas: as I began studying classic Nahuatl (language of the Aztec-Mexica & others, as spoke before western colonization) some years ago, I soon realized that the standard accepted translation of classic Nahuatl was translated according to western Christian society’s view, which means that the meanings of important concepts & views were distorted in order to fit them into the dominant western view. This is true of the other Indian languages as well. The concepts & views embedded within these native languages simply can’t be translated in the way that, say, English can be translated into Spanish, because concepts & views of Indian peoples developed independently of the “old world” cultures over a period of at least 30,000 years. Radically different concepts & views were developed in the Americas that were & are) alien to Europe & Asia, ideas & views which have no corresponding terms in “old world” languages. For example, Indian concepts re: gender. In all known native languages, gender is excluded from terms that refer to humans as a whole, to ethnic groups, & to people as a group (crowd). These languages are not based on the patriarchal views found in most (perhaps all) “old world” societies. In classic Nahuatl, for example, gender is not indicated at all except when the subject is involved in an activity such as giving birth, whereas in English gender is indicated regardless of activity; this gender division permeates the entire English language, from personal pronouns to terms for the human species, etc. The standard method of translating classic Nahuatl into English completely eliminates the Nahuatl concepts of gender....Nahuatl terms which don’t indicate gender are routinely translated into the English gender-indicating terms, which completely distorts Nahuatl concepts, forcing these concepts to conform to western patriarchal views. In classic Nahuatl the terms re: persons do not indicate gender as a rule; they indicate a person, a group of persons, an ethnic people, etc., in gender-free terms. By translating these Nahuatl terms in this way, the result is a colonization of the native language & the concepts within it, a forced conformity with western ideas & views. Someone reading the 16th c. codices in translation would assume that the Aztec-Mexica has held views of gender like those of western cultures, which is a false view.
This kind of translation of native languages is applied to other important concepts & views as well, particularly views of the natural world & the place of humans within that world. Native spiritual views are likewise changed and distorted by translation. Western languages do not contain similar terms as western concepts are very different from native concepts. For example, to translate my great-grandmother’s Cherokee name into English, I could say it means “Walks by Water” but this would give completely inadequate information on the true meaning;
to translate her name at all adequately would take several pages. None of the inherent Cherokee spiritual meanings are revealed when the name is translated in the standard way.
As most people don’t know any native language, I think they often don’t understand what it means to lose such a language. These languages cannot be translated adequately, and when one of the native languages is lost, a people’s entire world view is lost. This is why Raphael Lemkin, who coined the terms “genocide” & “crimes against nature” and who devoted his life to the study of this subject, considered the destruction of a language as a form of genocide. Native peoples have faced cultural genocide for several centuries now, and the preservation of our languages is paramount to our cultural survival. Concepts and views cannot be so easily translated; these languages need to continue for the cultures & peoples to continue. These ideas & views could be of great use to other peoples as well, in learning how to live within nature, as a part of nature.
Thank you. I've never thought about native languages in this way.
Many indigenous peoples of North America lived in patriarchal structures as well. I‘m curious about what structures of the English language you would classify as patriarchal in their origin?
Im so glad that these languages are being preserved
Groups of people and organizations are sure trying... but sadly there will still be hundreds to thousands of languages lost, even with all these measures being attempted and taken to save, preserve, and teach them, to bring them back to life. I am a native American English speaker & Linguistics major who has learned Spanish, Italian, a great deal of MSArabic but have abandoned it for now, and am currently in the process of learning Brazilian Portuguese (I do a lot of humanitarian work in Central and South America... all these videos I've been watching on the loss and attempts to save these endangered languages gives me such a burning desire to learn a rare dialect (or more than one if possible.. although learning a language is a HUGE undertaking and very difficult and tedious [but wonderful & spectacular] process) of one of these languages. I would absolutely love to focus on a rare or dying dialect of a language I already speak and try to keep it alive, that would make me feel like I'm doing something helpful and important indeed. Cheers
Thank you so much.
OMH!!! This talk is sooo good!!
It's not just tribes. Small villages in Ireland still speak Irish on the daily and the number of speakers in declining
Zlpsoopspllpll
"For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice."
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
What a fantastic conference! I enjoyed it so much, even with deep emotion
This so true. We must not let cultures and languages die.
Wow.... this talk culminated in painful final minutes. I expected at the end some sort of appeal, but the applause took it the chance to materialize out of the unspoken realm.
The concepts engrained in all these languages are vital for our ability to survive as a species our shortcomings and our wasteful attitude towards life in all its dimensions.
I pray we can keep not only most of those languages alive, but also inegrate their speakers into the designing process that builds our future. Until today we are left with something that could be named false cultural pride, when we look especially at the representatives of those languages as savages or primitives, while in the true sense of the words the three billion speakers of those major 50 languages proved to be literally just that: savages and primitives. It is as if we had to admit that the BARBARS of old were those using the term on everyone oher than themselves, i.e. the Greek and Roman cultures. From a supposed high standing point of development they came to decay with deteriorating values, and the reign of their teachings and values must end, because their languages and cultural legacy brings only death and destruction. How revolting an admission to make, but nothing could be more true.
Savages or primitives? I am still confused as to what you mean by this, despite your explanation or attempt at an explanation (no rudeness implied at all, I simply did not understand what what you meant). Please elaborate if you have a minute or two to do so. Thank you, and I know this was from a while back but I'm very fascinated and interested in what you were talking about and explaining. Cheers!
Amazing talk, preserving a language equates to preserving history, culture, and ethnicity. Our language Chimini is one example of a language at risk of disappearing, we must protect it.
You should teach your language.
@@alejandroto3094 I don't have time for that. Our new generations do not speak it and lost it already. They come from parents who speak the language but they live in a different country.
Awesome Lecture 😍
What an incredible project!
Fascinating
Madam, your video is outstanding, congratulations for your work. Warm regards. English trainer based in France.
Somehow I find this speech very ... hard to understand and to summary. I just couldn't pinpoint the key factors of the importance of a language. I also find it's hard to distinguish her main points. If someone would be so kind to help me, that would be great.
The same here
Too many people only think of language as just a form of communication, but really language is an extension of a people’s cultural identity. That it why one of the first things colonizers try to get rid of, whether it be during the colonial era or the modern imperialist era, is the language of indigenous people. She was also mentioning how, not only is it the person’s cultural identity, but language reflects cultural values and thoughts. And ofc, language allows you to find lost knowledge, whether it be to read old texts or old poems etc. This is something that still happens today, with larger countries that continue to assimilate their territories. The US still does this with their territories, like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, etc. China is also guilty of this too, with the way they treat their minority groups. The death of a language through the assimilation of the youth is a form of cultural genocide, and that is part of why there are so many people that care about preserving language.
@@animatheanimationarchive7577 thank you
Fabulous talk!
It's so interesting to learn about the accountability of Khanty. I'm so glad that languages are being preserved.
Amazing video. I'm nearly crying.
Me too, my friend. Me too :(
About 11:45, she mentions evidentiality systems. Those are actually not that uncommon cross-linguistically: Khanty or Mansi is not the only such language.
My language is dying, and even i don't speak it fluently.
what language is that?
@@mistermood4164 Arkhar, Most likely a Uralic or Altaic language
Please protect your language. You can make this...
I speak Aramiac/Assyrian/Chaldean. My language is dying and I'm sad );;;
@@fahadnajeeb7257 aramaic is the parent language for arabic right?
Very very interesting talk!!
(And, ASMR from 13:55)
Great video! Love it!
Is there a transcript for this? Want to share with a friend who has hearing loss.
There are subtitles, so you could watch it with your friend using those! How kind of you, you're a good friend. Cheers!
Language and culture need to protect by any influence,
option regional strictly. n english for globally communication.
So glad I have been bilinqual allmost half of my life!!! :)
Anyone knows what the two languages are in South Africa? The only language I can think of is Khoi-San languages... but one marker is near Lesotho which is not where the Khoi-Sans live.
사회, 경제적 요인이 언어의 멸종을 정당화하고 있다는 사실을 대부분은 방관하거나 아예 알지도 못한다는 점이 안타까웠습니다. 이렇게 인류 문화 자산의 번영을 위해 멸종 위기 언어를 지켜내고자 하는 분들을 응원하게 됩니다.
I think that one can't claim that a language is 70,000 years old, otherwise even English would be 70,000 years old because it is the descendent of Indo-European that was spoken some 7,000 years old that was itself the descendent of the hypothetic Nostratic that was spoken 15,000 years ago that might be, in its turn, the descendent of some unknown proto-language that was spoken by the ancestors of the ancestors of Indo-Europeans. Jeru is just a modern form, a descendent of an older language that was spoken on the Andaman islands, like many other languages there that are the result of 70,000 years of human presence on the islands.
Yeah I thought the same thing as you. Genetic studies have actually proven that the indigenous people of the Andaman islands are not the pure descendants of one migration to the islands anyway. 70,000 years is a completely random number. It's likely that 70,000 years ago human language was so basic that it was impossible to talk about genetic relationships between languages families.
Perhaps they mean a language that had basically gone unchanged for that amount of time, just as Icelandic has gone basically unchanged since the times of the Vikings. Cheers
Wow this so Beautiful
every sound or symbol is a gift from god universe....vibration and frequency....no language dies...only the receptor.
Can I use a clip from this for my video?
I love my language and I know it will not die because of efforts of our freedom language fighters but slowly going extinct is really sad
quick, my teacher assigned this as an assignment. someone tell me three things you learned from this video
This is all so sad to see how many languages are dying.
My language is BHOJPURI i too have same fear because my Language is not recognised in my countries constitution and it's numbers are decreasing every census 🥺
BRAVO MADAME MANDANA! Pls check our vlog SAVE OUR BUTUANON LANGUAGE AND LEAVE US A COMMENT. SALAMAT KADIYAO!
Any thoughts on language conservation?
I have one. If the world would agree to use one neutral (not belonging to any nation or ethnicity) language for international use, the speakers of "small" languages would feel less coerced to learn a "big" one. If you like this idea I suggest that you learn Esperanto
@@ronaldonmg 1000000%
what about Indian languages? mam
Lollll nooo
Aka Jeru is an Indian language (i.e, it was spoken in the Andaman Islands of India).
who else is here for Linguistics or an Endangered Linguistics Course?
I am currently doing research on the endangered language 'Lokono'.
吾鄉音鄉語村調，才是有文化內涵，普通話之盛行，讓人擔憂。
The pronunciation, language and tone are the rural cultural connotations and roots. The prevalence of Mandarin in China makes people worry about the disappearance of these indigenous languages and culture. Perhaps, English likes Mandarin's.
How many language I use? Sasak, Samawa, Indonesian, Javanese, Korean, Arabic, English. Just 7... lol
Where did you find resources to learn Javanese? I've found it challenging. 😅
Just 7?! Umm...Your a polyglot..
WHO'S HERE FROM SOCIAL AT CHURCHILL?!
YEET
sup Gurik tier 2
lol
AYYYYYY
LMAO SHAUNNNNN
Ð Plotditśw śpråk haf rôm 450,000 mênśw, óba fälw lirw d'ërw qîńa mó Śpanîś öda Ëńlîś, zö dõ lirw nimólts Plotditś.
The Plautdietsch language has about 450,000 speakers, but many are only teaching their kids Spanish or English, so they never learn Plautdietsch.
(Orthography I created to make it easier to read/write)
It looks like my conlangs :P
About 15:40, she mentions a language that is supposedly ~70,000 years old. Not strictly accurate; languages change. Even Chaucer's spoken English would probably be incomprehensible to us now (and Shakespeare's only borderline comprehensible). Jeru's ancestor from 70K years ago would be impossible, with known techniques, even to reconstruct; and during that time, its lineage would hav branched many times, likely giving rise to many other extant languages, quite possibly including Indo-European (Germanic, Italic, Greek, Slavic et al.). In other words, Jeru and Indo-European could well share an ancestor from not more than 70K years ago; given the time depth involved, there is no real way to prove that they don't.
Bro it's 2019 TWO THOUSAND AND 19 wtf you mean 70,000 years old?
@@fahadnajeeb7257 Did you not listen to this entire talk?
@@fahadnajeeb7257 Do u think that we've only been around for 2000 years? If so then man...
@@chaldeang7687 yeah?
@@chaldeang7687 wait we haven't???
Since now I know English. I’m planning to learn the other two popular languages and those are Spanish and Mandarin. But I fear that by 2050, many other languages besides the languages that I’m learning will go extinct.
I hope the UN pass a law stating that all nations around the world should learn their native languages first before learning other languages.
EX:
Which means people in Japan, must first learn Japanese first before learning other languages that they desire. And that they must also pass down their native language to their next generation.
It should not be a requirement EVER to learn a language. There are many languages that are native to lands that have limited population, meaning their ability to travel and communicate would be severely limited. Additionally, the problem of immigrants raises. If a family immigrated to a country with a separate native language, would their children be forced to learn that language rather than their parent's, or would they be raised bilingual? What about nations where there are several languages? For example, those of native tribes. The solution is not to force, as there are far too many limitations and flaws for it to be effective. We simply must provide the resources to the world to learn the languages optionally.
Soon most folks will either speak Chinise, english or arabic :(
😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 OMG😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Tell them that Arabic language is the language that will survive. It will not die.
Any big language, whether French, German, Spanish, English, Swahili or Russian will survive. The other half is uncertain.
Our langaue Punjabi is the 9th largest language in the world but its a dying language in Pakistan. Pakistan government discourage speaking Punjabi and encourage speaking Urdu and English. We Muslim and Sikh Punjabies were divided in two parts in 1947 by British colonials and after that bloody tragedy Punjabi Muslims uncounciously and gradually left Punjabi for Urdu. Most Punjabies don't speak their language with their children. They speak either Urdu or wrong English. Punjabi is not allowed in schools. So new generation of Punjabi children can understand a little Punjabi but they can't speak it. We are trying to pressure Pakistani govenment to make Punjabi a compulsory subject and medium of Instruction in all school of Province of Punjab.
As part of the younger generation, I have to say: it's not our fault there are languages dying. I still don't get why the world blame us on everything.
We are not being blamed for this, nobody is being blamed. People, linguists, organizations, etc, are simply trying to raise awareness of the many languages that are dying and becoming extinct for many different reasons and trying to preserve them and keep them alive. Nobody is being blamed. The point is to keep these spectacular languages alive, and all the different views and ways of thinking and seeing the world, etc, that they contain. Hope this helped clear that up. Cheers!
We don't blame "the younger generation". We blame capitalism, and the "bigger is better" superstition.
wait there's a language called hunty? LMAO
Khanty
It's related to Hungarian btw
Really. That's what you took from this talk?
It's Khanty, and there's nothing funny about it.
Save ARVANITIKA an sub Albanian dialect that engraved the modern greek identity, and that the modern greeks are trying to vanish it!!
Oh noes. Oogabooga-ish is dying!