You can listen below to living speakers of four languages that are dying. The material is an excerpt from a SeedMagazine article about The Amazing Race to record dying languages, and a PBS program to be aired on February 26 on the subject.
“The following sound clips are provided by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. They are used with the consent of the speakers and communities who are the owners of these languages.”
Audio: Endangered Languages
Tofa; Central Siberia, 35 speakers
Listen to mp3 | Tofa song, untranslated
Below is an excerpt from a SeedMagazine article about a PBS program on rescuing dying languages that will air on February 26.
Ho; eastern India, 1 million speakers
Listen to mp3 | Translation: “new moon”
Kallawaya; Bolivia, 100 speakers
Listen to mp3 | Untranslated
Chulym; Siberia, less than 10 speakers
Listen to mp3 | Translation: “Where are you going; where are you from; I’ve never seen such stupid people.”
The internet is rescuing languages from oblivion.
GoldenSwamp.com is about the global emergence of what is known by humankind from the working of network laws within the chaos of the internet. A clear example of this golden mechanism of emergence is the preservation of languages. In the days, just a couple of decades ago, when language media were limited to print and tape, languages were dying off with at best fragile ways to remember them.
That has changed. Right now, with one click, you can listen to Chulym, a language now only spoken by ten living people. The mp3 file you will hear is not from a magnetic tape that must be preserved in a physical vault. It is sequences of zeroes and ones in the digital cloud, where it can network with Siberians, their children, scholars, historians, and others.
