Documenting Endangered

Languages is a must

Ni Ketut Putri Nila Sudewi

1418351023
 What is Endangered Languages?

An endangered language is a language that is at

risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out
or shift to speaking another language. Language
loss occurs when the language has no more native
speakers, and becomes a “dead language". If
eventually no one speaks the language at all, it
becomes an "extinct language".
 In Indonesia, have tens of thousands of
speakers but are endangered because children
are no longer learning them, and speakers are
shifting to using the national language
(e.g. Indonesian) in place of local languages. In
contrast, a language with only 500 speakers
might be considered very much alive if it is the
primary language of a community, and is the
first (or only) spoken language of all children
in that community.
 Methods

An endangered language documentation projects aim

to collect/create audio, video, graphic and text
documentation material covering use of language in a
variety of social and cultural contexts. The priorities for
collecting, recording, analyzing, and archiving are:
1. to create a range of high quality materials to support
description of a variety of language phenomena
2. to enable the recovery of knowledge of the language
even if all other sources are lost
3. to generate resources in support of language
maintenance and/or learning
 Why we must documenting
endangered language?
Documentation is the key to preserving
endangered languages. Linguists are trying to
document as many as they can by describing
grammars and structural features, by recording
spoken language and by using computers to store
this information for study by scholars. Many
endangered languages are only spoken; no
written texts exist. So it is important to act
quickly in order to capture them before they go
extinct.
 To help preserve endangered languages, E-
MELD (Electronic Met structure for Endangered
Language Data) aims to boost documentation by:
• duplicating and digitizing high-quality recordings in an
archival form;
• emphasizing self-documenting and software-
independent data;
• giving linguists a toolkit to analyze and compare
languages;
• developing a General Ontology for Linguistic
Description (GOLD) to allow interoperability of
archives, and comparability of data and analysis.
 Example
Dusner
The spoken tribal language in the
Wandamen Bay area Cenderawasih
in Papua, Indonesia, this language is
critically endangered as it was
reported that there are only three
remaining speakers of this language,
and they were reported to be injured
during natural disasters. Linguists
from the University of Oxford are
striving to preserve the Dusner
language as it was reported that two
of those remaining native speakers
narrowly escaped death during a
flood while the other one is living
near a volcano when it erupted.