I have talked a lot about language revitalization on this blog. It might seem a little weird as a topic for a travel blog, but let me explain. Everywhere you travel, you’re going to encounter new languages. This is expected. But there are many small ones on the sidelines, spoken only privately in homes or…
I want to talk more about what I’ve been calling “vigilante revitalization”. I recently wrote a series of posts about dying languages, discussing the importance of revitalization and why it’s a difficult process. Now, a new obstacle has come up: AI-generated books. If you’re new here, or didn’t see those posts, the most relevant one…
Hello again! In the last couple of weeks I’ve been talking about language death. This will be the last of three posts about the topic, in which I talk about how you can help with language death. It’s probably not going to be what you expect. If you’ve just found your way here, you might…
Last week I wrote about why language death is such a big deal. This week I wanted to expand on this idea a bit further and talk about some of the ongoing difficulties with language revitalization that linguists have to deal with. Why Language Revitalization can be Difficult Linguists who work in language revitalization have…
Language death is a constant problem and always will be. How many languages do you think about on a daily basis? And how many would you say you actually know about? Maybe 10-20? If you wrote them all out, the list might not be very big. The list of languages you speak, natively or even…