LINGUIS R1B Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Cultural Appropriation
21 Jun 2017
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Document Summary
7000 languages in the world, at least half will be gone in the next century - global crisis. Where languages are dying fastest, why some die, how we can save, why should we care. We don"t know what we"re losing but we know it has value to speakers community and to global knowledge. Responsibility as a linguist to preserve the wisdom from the languages, to archive what they have for the future. Greatest conservation challenge; more pressing than architecture or biological diversity, older and more complex, small communities face the greatest difficulties so they need help from outside. Social barrier: building trust among the native speakers. Science bias: notion that science knows all is wrong because what modern science has not touched, indigenous knowledge knows well. Compartmentalization of language causes scientists to only know half of the process (local language only / discovery of species only)
