Abstract
This article analyses the overall development of the endangered language around the world in reference to UNESCO’s Atlas of World Endangered Languages and reflects on the local context. The ...focus to local context refers to the current territory of North Macedonia in which it is believed there are 7 endangered languages such as: Adyge, Aromanian, Gagauz (South Balkans), Megleno-Romanian, Judezmo, Romani and Torlak. These languages are classified as endangered but are still spoken in the country. The article also reflects on the status of the Albanian language in North Macedonia by drawing comparisons with two other language varieties such as Arberesh which spoken in Southern Italy and Arvanitika spoken in Greece. The challenges that these minority languages have faced in particular countries should serve as a guide in designing effective language policies in North Macedonia in order for the language not be endangered. In the last section the article report on the phenomena of Globalization in which English has become the global language and at the same time has accelerated the loss of many native languages around the globe.
In this work, we present a morphological segmenter for the Mexican indigenous language Wixarika. Segmentation is fundamental for rich morphological languages, a common aspect of the native American ...languages, to improve other tasks like machine translation, dialogue systems, summarization, etc. On top of the agglutinative nature of the language, the low amount of resources and the lack of an orthographic standard among dialects add to the challenge. Our proposal is based on a probabilistic finite-state approach that exploits regular agglutinative patterns and requires little linguistic knowledge. We show that our approach outperforms unsupervised and semi-supervised methods in a low-resource context. The dataset used in this work was openly released for future work by the community.
Remembering G. Tucker Childs (1948-2021) Mc Laughlin, Fiona; Dingemanse, Mark; Good, Jeff ...
Studies in African linguistics,
09/2021, Letnik:
50, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
An obituary for Tucker Childs, documentary linguist and former editor of Studies in African Linguistics, who died on Jan 26, is presented. Childs made immense contributions to the study of the ...Atlantic and Mel languages of West Africa, and to the field of African linguistics more broadly. The impact of Tucker's scholarship can be felt in his fine descriptive work on the endangered Mel languages of Sierra Leone, where he first served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and Guinea, namely Kisi, Krim and Mani. His 1995 grammar of Kisi and his 2013 grammar of Mani stand as major contributions to the documentation and analysis of Mel languages. Tucker's approach to language documentation was a passionate and holistic one, and he immersed himself in the life of the communities whose languages he studied, going to great lengths to make their languages count, long before the field of linguistics acknowledged the importance of undertaking work of this kind.
Sparse Transcription Bird, Steven
Computational linguistics - Association for Computational Linguistics,
02/2021, Letnik:
46, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The transcription bottleneck is often cited as a major obstacle for efforts to
document the world’s endangered languages and supply them with language
technologies. One solution is to extend methods ...from automatic speech
recognition and machine translation, and recruit linguists to provide narrow
phonetic transcriptions and sentence-aligned translations. However, I believe
that these approaches are not a good fit with the available data and skills, or
with long-established practices that are essentially word-based. In seeking a
more effective approach, I consider a century of transcription practice and a
wide range of computational approaches, before proposing a computational model
based on spoken term detection that I call “sparse transcription.”
This represents a shift away from current assumptions that we transcribe phones,
transcribe fully, and transcribe first. Instead, sparse transcription combines
the older practice of word-level transcription with interpretive, iterative, and
interactive processes that are amenable to wider participation and that open the
way to new methods for processing oral languages.
Endangered Languages in the 21st Century provides research on endangered languages in the contemporary world, the challenges still to be faced, the work still to be done, and the methods and ...practices that have come to characterize efforts to revive and maintain disadvantaged indigenous languages around the world. With contributions from scholars across the field, the book brings fresh data and insights to this imperative, but still relatively young, field of linguistics. While the studies acknowledge the threat of losing languages in an unprecedented way, they focus on cases that show resilience and explore paths to sustainable progress. The articles are also intended as a celebration of the 25 years’ work of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and as a parting gift to FEL’s founder and quarter-century chair, Nick Ostler. This book will be informative for researchers, instructors, and specialists in the field of endangered languages. The book can also be useful for university graduate or undergraduate students, and language activists.
Dompo, spoken in the northwestern corner of the Bono Region in Ghana, is critically endangered. For several decades, the speakers of Dompo have not actively transmitted it to the next generation, but ...rather have adopted Nafaanra (believed to be originally from Kakala, Ivory Coast). As a result, there are only about six fluent speakers of Dompo, between the ages of forty-eight and ninety-six. Dompo history and their annual festival are also discussed in this article, which concludes with a discussion of why the language is now in a moribund state.
Many of the world's languages face serious risk of extinction. Efforts to prevent this cultural loss are severely constrained by a poor understanding of the geographical patterns and drivers of ...extinction risk. We quantify the global distribution of language extinction risk—represented by small range and speaker population sizes and rapid declines in the number of speakers—and identify the underlying environmental and socioeconomic drivers. We show that both small range and speaker population sizes are associated with rapid declines in speaker numbers, causing 25% of existing languages to be threatened based on criteria used for species. Language range and population sizes are small in tropical and arctic regions, particularly in areas with high rainfall, high topographic heterogeneity and/or rapidly growing human populations. By contrast, recent speaker declines have mainly occurred at high latitudes and are strongly linked to high economic growth. Threatened languages are numerous in the tropics, the Himalayas and northwestern North America. These results indicate that small-population languages remaining in economically developed regions are seriously threatened by continued speaker declines. However, risks of future language losses are especially high in the tropics and in the Himalayas, as these regions harbour many small-population languages and are undergoing rapid economic growth.
This commentary focuses on what editors and reviewers could do to increase the publication of research on understudied languages. Specifically, I discuss three areas in which editors and reviewers ...could shift their perspectives and, in so doing, support the goal of increasing diversity in our field: (1) Rethinking the criteria for novelty of contribution, (2) Contextualizing sample sizes and methods and (3) Embracing multilingualism as typical development. Finally, I discuss issues around achieving equity in an English-dominant publishing world.
As linguists theorize about language endangerment and loss (LEL), we must understand the big picture: the coexistence of languages in particular polities and how the competition that sometimes arises ...is resolved. Many concerns have been voiced about LEL since the early 1990s, but theoretical developments regarding language vitality lag far behind linguists’ current investment in language advocacy. While discussing issues such as the failure to connect the subject matter to language evolution in general, the framing of LEL as deleterious almost exclusively to ‘indigenous peoples’, a lack of historical time depth, and the omission of the ecological factors in typical approaches to LEL, I argue that linguistics should theorize about language vitality more adequately than has been the case to date.
This volume undertakes a linguistic exploration of the endangered Arabic dialect spoken by the Jews of Gabes, a coastal city situated in Southern Tunisia. Belonging to the category of sedentary North ...African dialects, this variety is now spoken by a dwindling number of native speakers, primarily in Israel and France. Given the imminent extinction faced by many modern varieties of Judaeo-Arabic, including Jewish Gabes, the study's primary goal is to document and describe its linguistic nuances while reliable speakers are still accessible. Data for this comprehensive study were collected during fieldwork in Israel and France between December 2018 and March 2022. The volume's primary objective is a meticulous comparative analysis of Jewish Gabes, with a special emphasis on syntax, aiming to discern unique linguistic features through comparison with other North African dialects. The results of the study suggest that the Jewish dialect of Gabes emerged in the first wave of the Arab conquest of the Maghreb, thus exhibiting features that set it apart from its Muslim counterpart. This old variety therefore has the potential to provide invaluable information on the formation of Maghrebi Arabic and the mechanisms of language contact in the pre-Islamic Maghreb. The volume is organised in three main sections: phonology, morphology, and syntax, with the syntax section adopting historical and typological perspectives to shed light on this linguistic terra incognita.
PDF
