Here is one example from northern Europe:

The definition of who is Sami is based on language criteria. A person is considered Sami if he consideres himself Sami and either has himself learned Sami or has at least one parent or grandparent who has learned Sami as his mother tongue. In Norway, there are more than 40,000, in Sweden more than 20,000, in Finland 6,500, and in Russia 2,000 Sami.

There are several Sami languages, even as many as nine (depending on the definition of language).

In Finland, very few public services are available in Sami. In 1992, a Language Act was passed in Finland to guarantee the official status and use of the Sami language. Today, the Sami have a right to use Sami when dealing with the authorities. In practice this only amounts to the use of interpretation and translation services.

The situation is worst for the small lingual communities: those speaking Inari Sami and Skolt Sami.

From http://www.yle.fi/samiradio/saamelen.htm.

My neewspaper says there is only one qualified teacher of Skolt Sami in the world.

It is scandalous that Gaelic, de jure the primary official language of Ireland, is not a language of the EU. The Web site of the EU does not include a single word in Irish.

Scott

Skolt Sámi also has the unenviable distinction of being the only ancient or modern European language written in the Latin script that the multilingual Dvorak keyboard that I designed does not (yet) fully support.

Scott

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s928593.htm

[snip] Languages evolve and compete with each other much like plants and animals, but those driven to extinction are almost always tongues with a low social status, U.S. research shows.

The social status of a language is the most accurate way of predicting whether it will survive, argue researchers in a paper appearing today in the journal, Nature. They also suggest that active intervention to boost the status of rare and endangered languages can save them.

....by comparing various influences that help to explain the steadily declining numbers of speakers of each language, Abrams and Strogatz singled out status as the single most significant factor that could predict its extinction threat.

"Quechua, for example, still has many speakers in Huanuco, Peru," they note. "But its low status is driving a rapid shift to Spanish, which leads to an unfortunate situation in which a child cannot communicate with his or her grandparents."

A language's fate generally depends on both its number of speakers and its perceived status, the latter usually reflecting the social or economic opportunities afforded to its speakers, they said. When two languages are in competition, the one that offers the greatest opportunities to its speakers will usually prevail....

They also cite a real-life instance where this has happened: "The example of Québec French demonstrates that language decline can be slowed by strategies such as policy-making, education and advertising, in essence increasing an endangered language's status."

After 55 years of toil, Sanskrit dictionary not even close

By Tim Sullivan
The Associated Press

Now, 55 years after a group of scholars began composing the authoritative dictionary of Sanskrit, the long-dead language of India's ancient glory, they are almost done — with the first letter.

The project has consumed the skills of more than two dozen scholars (so far), cataloged 9 million citations of Sanskrit terms and given the most thorough of definitions to thousands of words.

"The project is huge," said Bhatta, who has spent 22 years, well over a third of his life, working on the dictionary. After a pause, he continued: "It is really huuuuge."

Like Latin in the medieval West, Sanskrit in ancient India was the language of the elite, largely limited to scholars, royalty and priests. The works they wrote, on everything from astronomy to the lives of Hindu deities, helped mold centuries of intellectual life and remained in wide use until about 1100 A.D.

"In those days, it was everything," said Bhatta.

Today, India's 1.02 billion people have 18 official languages, including English. Hindi is the most widely spoken, but the dictionary is a Sanskrit-English production, attesting to the abiding power of English as a lingua franca of the Indian elite.

The 16 scholars mostly work at chipped wooden tables in a large room lined with dusty metal bookshelves. Technology often amounts to a pencil stub and a paperweight.

"We're hoping for computers in one or two years," Kshirsagar said, not sounding very hopeful.

The project was launched in 1948, a year after India's independence from Britain, to highlight its history and prove it was more than a poverty-ravaged colossus.

While Sanskrit died out as a spoken tongue centuries ago, it's still an official Indian language.

Sanskrit is so agonizingly complex that after 40 years of studies, even the scholars can seldom just open a book and understand it. For every word there are many definitions, and for every definition there often are many allegorical meanings.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/text/2001275153_sanskrit28.html

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone. In this updated iteration, our goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages. Our intention is to create a unique platform for comparative linguistic research and education as well as a functional linguistic tool that might help in the recovery or revitalization of lost languages in unknown futures.

We are creating this broad language archive through an open contribution, open review process and we invite you to participate. The resulting archive will be publicly available in three different media: a micro-etched nickel disk with 2,000 year life expectancy; a single volume monumental reference book; and through this growing online archive.

A new Rosetta initiative to curate word lists for "all" human languages within three years. We are currently at 1,200 of 7,000 languages and know of sources to get us to around 4,000.

http://www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/Redbook/

Promoting Endangered Languages and Literatures Outside Their Local Communities: Strategies for Education

Nadine Grimm and Laura Martin

The Word

And I speak now the word,

this one, with which you carved mountains

of glyphs,

this one, with which you saved the birdsong

in gourds,

this one, with which you bound our history to stone,

old grandfather. . .

Once the word is recovered

on the point of the tongue of my brush . . .

And to the beat of our drum

we sit on the edge of the world

to savor our word

Abstract One way to promote the cause of endangered languages through their literatures is to expand the audience for them beyond the local communities of speakers, scholars, and activists that most obviously support their preservation. We offer K’inal Winik as a model for building new audiences for indigenous literature among the educated public generally, and among K-12 and university teachers and their students more particularly. K’inal Winik is a long-running program of public cultural events about the Maya. It has recently redirected its focus toward education about the contemporary Maya through their cultural productions, including literature. Using a variety of strategies, including extensive school-based initiatives, teacher development activities, curriculum materials production, collaborative project design, and international partnerships. K’inal Winik seeks to integrate the widely available information about the Maya of the past with innovative interdisciplinary products and methods that can be used at any level and across disciplines. As more and more people thus learn about the contemporary Maya, we hope that they will adopt attitudes of support toward modern Mayan languages, literatures, and communities as well.

"Breton, in north-east France, is a classic example of a language reducing dramatically in numbers. At the beginning of the 20th century it was spoken by a million people; it is now down to less than a quarter of that. Breton can be saved if enough effort is made - the kind of effort that has already helped Welsh to recover from a dramatic decline - otherwise it could be gone in 50 years. In recent times, this has already happened to two other Celtic languages in northern Europe: Manx, which was formerly spoken on the Isle of Man, and Cornish. Both are currently attracting support, but once a language has lost its last native speaker, resurrecting it is difficult....

Is language death such a disaster? Surely, you might say, it is simply a symptom of more people striving to improve their lives by joining the modern world. So long as a few hundred or even a couple of thousand languages survive, that is sufficient. No, it is not. We should care about dying languages for the same reason that we care when a species of animal or plant dies. It reduces the diversity of our planet. In the case of language, we are talking about intellectual and cultural diversity, not biological diversity, but the issues are the same.

Diversity occupies a central place in evolutionary theory because it enables a species to survive in different environments. Increasing uniformity holds dangers for the long-term survival of a species. The strongest ecosystems are those which are most diverse. The need to maintain linguistic diversity stands on the shoulders of such arguments. If the development of multiple cultures is a prerequisite for successful human development, then the preservation of linguistic diversity is essential, because cultures are chiefly transmitted through spoken and written languages. Encapsulated within a language is most of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. "Every language is a temple," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, "in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined."

Sometimes what we might learn from a language is eminently practical, as when we discover new medical treatments from the folk medicine of an indigenous people. Sometimes it is intellectual, as when the links between languages tell us something about the movements of early civilisations. Sometimes it is literary: every language has its equivalent - even if only in oral form - of Chaucer, Wordsworth and Dickens. And of course, very often it is linguistic: we learn something new about language itself - the behaviour that makes us truly human, and without which there would be no talk at all. Ezra Pound summed up the core intellectual argument: "The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension."

Not everyone agrees. Some people accept the Babel myth: that the multiplicity of the world's languages is a curse rather than a blessing, imposed by God as a punishment for the overweening pride of humanity. If only we had just one language in the world - whether English, Esperanto, or whatever - we would all be better off. World peace would be established.

Let us leave aside the question of whether there ever was a single language pre-Babel. (Genesis 10 suggests that there was not, as it lists the sons of Japheth "according to their countries and each of their languages" - long before the Babel event.) A monolingual world would not bring peace. All the big trouble spots of the world in recent decades have been monolingual countries - Cambodia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Burundi, Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland. And all big monolingual countries have had their civil wars. If people want to fight each other, it takes more than a common language to stop them.

The common reaction among the members of a community two generations after the one which failed to pass on its language is: "If only my grandparents' generation had..." The first generation is, typically, not so concerned as its members are still struggling to establish their new social position and new language. It is their children, secure in the new language and in a much better socio-economic position, with battles over land claims and civil rights behind them, who begin to reflect on the heritage they have lost. The old language, formerly a source of shame, comes to be seen as a source of identity and pride. If their language has gone, unrecorded and unremembered, there is no way they can get it back. By contrast, if a modicum of effort has been devoted to language preservation, even in the most difficult of circumstances, it leaves the option open for future generations to make their own choice...."

--David Crystal is honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. This is edited from a 1999 issue of Prospect magazine, the political and cultural monthly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,259507,00.html

 * * *

According to a recent United Nations environmental programme report, threatened languages store the knowledge about how to maintain and use sustainably some of the most vulnerable and most biologically diverse environments in the world. It has taken centuries for people to learn about their environments and to name the complex ecological relationships that are decisive for maintenance of biodiversity. When indigenous peoples lose their languages, much of this knowledge also disappears: the dominant languages do not have the ethno-biological and ethno-medical vocabulary, and the stories will not be translated.

If the long-lasting co-evolution that people have had with their environments is suddenly disrupted, without nature (and people) having enough time to adjust and adapt, we can expect a catastrophe. If during the next 100 years we murder up to 90% of the linguistic (and thereby mostly also the cultural) diversity that is our treasury of this historically developed ecological knowledge, we are also seriously undermining our chances of life on Earth.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/old/tefl/story/0,10044,467440,00.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/africa/12africa.html

...In Kenya, Microsoft has rounded up some of the region's top Swahili scholars to come up with a glossary of 3,000 technical terms - the first step in the company's effort to make Microsoft products accessible to Swahili speakers.

Sitting around a conference table recently in Microsoft's sleek offices in downtown Nairobi, the linguists discussed how to convey basic words from the computer age in Swahili, also known as Kiswahili, beginning with the most basic one of all.

"When these modern machines arrived, Kiswahili came up with a quick word for something that didn't exist in our culture," said Clara Momanyi, a Swahili professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. "That was 'kompyuta.' "

But scholars subsequently opted for a more local term to describe these amazing machines, she said. It is tarakilishi, which is a combination of the word for "image" and the word for "represent."

The Swahili experts grappled with a variety of other words. How does one say folder? Should it be folda, which is commonly used, or kifuko, a more formal term?

Is a fax a faksi, as the Tanzanians call it, or a kipepesi?

Everyone seemed to agree that an e-mail message was a barua pepe, which means a fast letter. Everyone also seemed to agree that the effort they were engaged in to bring Swahili to cyberspace was long overdue.