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As more and more people speak the global languages of English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken around the world today willlikely die out by the next century, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations—UNESCO and National Geographic among them—have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.
Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Centre Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oraltraditions of the Himalayas, is following in that tradition. His recently published book, A Grammar of Thangmi with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture, grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.
Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India , Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not content to simply record these voices before they disappear without record.
At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials—including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes—which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection.
Now, through the two organizations that he has founded –the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project—Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, found in libraries and stores around the world, available not just to scholars but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.
