Los Angeles artists – Cola Smith, Leticia Martinez and Sandra Zebi – communicating incommunicado.
Ethnologue
Ethnologue is an impressive encyclopedic print/web reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages. It is owned by SIL International – a faith based organization. (See endangered languages below)
Users can browse the web version by country indexes with maps, primary language names, language codes and language families. Statistical summaries are separated into world area, language size, language family and by country. The catalogue includes an expansive bibliography of data sources and of endangered languages.
Each language is listed in terms of population and region, features a language map, alternative names where applicable, classification, language use, how the language is developed and the related writing system.
Included, is sign language from various cultures like Adamorobe Sign Language from Ghana, Afghan sign language, Armenian Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, Mozambican, Salvadoran and Thai, to name a few.
Below are other interesting facts from specific countries. Link
Nigeria
With a population of about 150,million, the West African republic of Nigeria has a listing of 527 languages of which “514 are living languages, 2 are second languages without mother-tongue speakers, and 11 have no known speakers.” The three major Nigerian languages in terms of population of native speakers are Igbo/Ibo (Eastern Nigeria) – 18,000,000 speakers, Yoruba (Western Nigeria) – 18,900,000 and Hausa (Northern Nigeria) – 18,500,000.
Hausa is also spoken in the Republic of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Niger and Sudan, while Yoruba is also spoken in the Republic of Benin and is influential in Cuban and Brazilian cultures by way of the transatlantic slave trade.
Video of American woman (Titilayo) speaking Yoruba
India
As of 1991 180,000,000 people in India spoke Hindi with an estimated worldwide population of 181,676,620 including Bangladesh, Belize, Bhutan, Botswana, Canada, Djibouti, Germany, Kenya, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Yemen and Zambia.
Filipino guy speaking in Hindi language
China
The Chinese language encompasses Chinese pidgin, Chinese Sign Language, Chinese Gan, Hakka, Huizhou, Jinyu,Mandarin, Min Bei, Min Dong, Min Nan, Min Zhong, Pu-Xian, Wu, Xiang and Yue.
“840,000,000 in China (2000 census), increasing. 70% of Chinese language users speak a Mandarin dialect as their mother tongue, including 9,816,805 Hui (2000 census) and 10,682,262 Manchu. 1,182,950,000 Han in China (2005 census). Population total all countries: 845,456,760.” Link
Nigerian Uwechue Emmanuel(Hao Ge 郝歌）sings Chinese songs on Chinese TV.
Endangered languages
473 of the languages listed in the Ethnologue are classified as nearly extinct when “only a few elderly speakers are still living.”
The statistics listed are as follows: Africa (46 total), The Americas (182 total), Asia (84 total), Europe (9 total), The Pacific (152 total)
SIL, a faith based nonprofit organization, catalogs endangered languages (see related documentary below) “SIL International is a faith-based nonprofit organization committed to serving language communities worldwide as they build capacity for sustainable language development. SIL does this primarily through research, translation, training and materials development. Founded in 1934, SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc) has grown from a small summer linguistics training program with two students to a staff of over 5,500 coming from over 60 countries. SIL’s linguistic investigation exceeds 2,590 languages spoken by over 1.7 billion people in nearly 100 countries. The organization makes its services available to all, without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race or ethnolinguistic background.” Link
The Endangered Language Fund (ELF) claims there are currently 7000 languages spoken in the world and at least half are projected to disappear in this century.
ELF states its goal as “… supporting endangered language preservation and documentation projects. Our main mechanism for supporting work on endangered languages has been funding grants to individuals, tribes, and museums.” Link
In addition to Ethnologue, SIL and ELF, The Rosetta Project bills itself as “a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publically accessible digital library of human languages.”
It’s resources include a downloadable PDF at the Internet Archive, of “A Complete Grammar of Esperanto 1910.” Esperanto was invented by Ludwik Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist who was convinced that the intense acrimony between ethnic Germans, Jews, Poles and Russians in his city of Biyalstok, Poland was caused by language differences. He then set out to foster understanding and peace through the creation of a common language.
The structure of Esperanto (the name means, in Esperanto, “one who hopes”) reflects this ideal. The vocabulary, grammar, and sound system incorporate elements from all major European languages, and the structure is completely regular, making Esperanto very easy to learn. While the original goal of being a universally adopted language is still a bit far off, the Ethnologue estimates that there are 2 million speakers worldwide, with as many as 2,000 who learned Esperanto as their native language. That’s right, native Esperanto speakers. Couples who have met at Esperanto conventions will have no common language other than Esperanto, meaning that their children often grow up in an Esperanto-speaking household.
There are supposedly over 25,000 available original and translated books in Esperanto. Lots more on Esperanto here.
The Stuff of Genius- Esperanto: The L.L. Zamenhof Story
Esperanto and Esperantists
Klingon
A search for Star Trek’s Klingon language in the Ethnologue returned the following:
“The language referenced by this code is an ancient, classical, or constructed language with no living mother-tongue speakers, or was identified as extinct before 1950 (when Ethnologue began). Language identifier code documentation for Klingon [tlh] is maintained by The Linguist List.”
Author Marc Okrand is credited with developing the Klingon language – an online archive can be found at The Klingon Language Institute – promoters and supporters of the “warrior tongue.”
Tailenders Documentary
In 2005, Los Angeles based filmmaker Adele Horne made a film, Tailenders, documenting an evangelical Christian missionary group, Global Recordings, whose founder Joy Ridderhof set an ambitious goal in 1939 of recording audio of biblical texts in every language. In the course of doing so, they recorded some languages that have since gone extinct.
“Filmed in the Solomon Islands, Mexico, India, and the United States,
The Tailenders explores the connections between missionary activity and global capitalism. The Tailenders examines a missionary organization’s use of ultra-low-tech audio devices to evangelize indigenous communities facing crises caused by global economic forces.”
Link
POV . “The Tailenders” . Filmmaker Interview | PBS
Filmmaker Adele Horne talks about what drew her to the subject of “The Tailenders,” a film about a group of evangelical missionaries who use ultra-low-tech hand-crank recordings of Bible stories to reach people in the most isolated areas of the world.
National Geographic – Enduring Voices
Nearly 80 percent of the world’s population speaks only one percent of its languages. When the last speaker of a language dies, the world loses the knowledge that was contained in that language. The goal of the Enduring Voices Project is to document endangered languages and prevent language extinction by identifying the most crucial areas where languages are endangered and embarking on expeditions to:
- Understand the geographic dimensions of language distribution
- Determine how linguistic diversity is linked to biodiversity
- Bring wide attention to the issue of language loss
Link
An easy way to learn foreign languages
Luca’s language learning philosophy on his blog