UN Unveils Digital Atlas Of Dying Languages
02.19.09 |
Nearly half of humanity's languages are dying, the victims of a rapidly modernizing world. While the United Nations can't save them all, it is at least trying to track their disappearance.
The UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is issuing a new edition of a unique atlas that marks the geography of vanishing mother tongues. First published in 1996, the atlas is going digital with an online interactive map. People can track the 25-hundred languages and dialects most in danger of extinction.
When a language dies, it takes with it what the UN terms "the unique cultural wisdom of a people." Some six-thousand languages still exist, but it is hard to find most of them in constant use. Some 90-percent of Internet traffic is conducted in only a dozen languages, for example.
The UN considers a language to be endangered when it is no longer being taught widely to children. When 30-percent of a population's children grow up with no knowledge of their parents' tongue, the language may have a limited future. The Atlas goes live online today at portal.unesco.org.
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