Tag: endangered languages
Card Game Aims to Revitalize Traditional Mongolian Script
The traditional Mongolian writing system—a vertical top-to-bottom, left-to-right alphabet—dates all the way back to the early days of the Mongol Empire. However, in the script’s homeland, official and day-to-day communications have been written in the Cyrillic script since the 1940s. As a result, the Endangered Alphabets Project considers it to be an endangered writing system, and is working on...
Languages, Plants, and People
K. David Harrison on Environmental Linguistics
This is the first of an ongoing series of articles that Language Magazine will be publishing to call attention to the importance of connections between language and environment
A walk in the forest
Two decades ago, I walked through the Siberian taiga with Marta Kongarayeva (born 1930), a lifelong huntress and forager, and one of the last...
Japan Recognizes Ainu
The Japanese government has endorsed a bill to officially
recognize the Ainu ethnic minority as an indigenous people of Japan for the
first time and calls for “the creation of a society in which they can take
pride in their heritage.” However, the move may have come too late to save the
Ainu language, now spoken by only a handful of people.
The bill...