世界語言的未來
The Future of the World’s Language

The nation is an ethnically homogeneous country.
該國是個單一族裔的國家。

The college student is interested in the linguistic development of young children.
那位大學生對幼童的語言發展很感興趣。

He teaches the students to appreciate the diversity of other cultures.
他教導學生要會欣賞其他文化的多樣性。

Giraffes are in danger of extinction.
長頸鹿正處於絕種的危險之中。

Antarctica has no indigenous population.
南極洲沒有原住民。

The students are collaborating to complete the experiment project.
這些學生同心協力完成這項實驗計劃。

An anthropologist is someone who studies humans and their customs and beliefs.
人類學者是在研究人類以及他們的風俗習慣和宗教信仰。

The managers collate information about their company’s competitors.
經理們收集公司競爭者的資料。

An archive is a place where a large number of records are stored.
資料庫是一個儲存大量記錄的地方。

The animal has been listed as one of the endangered species in the world.
這類動物已被列為世界瀕臨絕種的動物之一。

The Future of the World’s Language

Of the world’s 6,500 living languages, around half are expected to die out by the end of this century, according to UNESCO. Just 11 are spoken by more than half of the earth’s population, so it is little wonder that those used by only a few are being left behind as we become a more homogenous, global society. In short, 95 percent of the world’s languages are spoken by only five percent of its population—a remarkable level of linguistic diversity stored in tiny pockets of speakers around the world. Mark Turin, a university professor, has launched WOLP(World Oral Literature Project) to prevent the language from the brink of extinction.

He is trying to encourage indigenous communities to collaborate with anthropologists around the world to record what he calls “oral literature” through video cameras, voice recorders and other multimedia tools by awarding grants from a £30,000 pot that the project has secured this year. The idea is to collate this literature in a digital archive that can be accessed on demand and will make the nuts and bolts of lost cultures readily available.

For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of their culture. The stories they tell are creative as well as communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few indigenous communities have recorded their own languages or ever had them recorded until now.

The project suggested itself when Turin was teaching in Nepal. He wanted to study for a PhD in endangered languages and, while discussing it with his professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, was drawn to a map on his tutor’s wall. The map was full of pins of a variety of colours which represented all the world’s languages that were completely undocumented.

At random, Turin chose a “pin” to document. It happened to belong to the Thangmi tribe, an indigenous community in the hills east of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. “Many of the choices anthropologists and linguists who work on these traditional field-work projects take are quite random,” he admits…