The Language Conservancy - Project for Awesome 2016

We're supporting the Language Conservancy this year in the Project for Awesome! You can click over here to go vote on our video: projectforawesome.com/watch?v=...
If you don't know about the Project for Awesome, it's a yearly charity and awareness raising campaign on KZbin aimed at decreasing world suck. Find out more at www.projectforawesome.com!
The Language Conservancy does a lot of really interesting and amazing work for helping revitalize and raise awareness about Native American languages, and they're worthy of your time and support, even outside the P4A. Check out their website, which has a ton of info about their activities, at www.languageconservancy.org/
Here's links to the stuff we mention in the video:
Rising Voices film: www.risingvoicesfilm.com/
Lakota Berenstain Bears: www.lakotabears.com/
Mandan-English dictionary: www.mandanlanguage.org/diction...
Water Protectors activity: donate.lakhota.org/mni/
Crow Summer Institute: crowlanguage.org/crow-summer-i...
Language learning apps and keyboard layouts: www.languageconservancy.org/pr...
And we at the Ling Space make videos to help explain how language works, every Wednesday. Find out more at www.thelingspace.com, or watch the rest of our videos on this channel.
DFTBA!

[@ReadHeadPat]

This is sooo important!!! You definitely have my vote!!!

[@thelingspace]

Great! Thanks so much. ^_^

[@jennifercampbell2512]

Thank you for sharing a cool charity! Happy P4A!!

[@thelingspace]

Thanks for watching! It was a great P4A this year. Glad you liked our video, too. ^_^

[@SciJoy]

Really interesting charity I've never heard of. Happy P4A!

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! Glad you liked it. They do some really good work! And same to you, I always like this time of year. ^_^

[@tiemenbosma5793]

great!

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! ^_^

[@kateliu5519]

Great vid! Voted for yours!

[@thelingspace]

Thanks so much! ^_^

[@DakotaAbroad]

AH! So it's a focus on teaching people within the community to speak the language of their culture? That's really cool. I've seen some people saying to learn dying languages to save them and while I think saving them is important is someone like me learning Cherokee actually THAT helpful in the long run in terms of preserving the culture? If the language was flooded with outsiders wouldn't it possibly change it drastically? (Keyword being possibly.) Obviously I'm all for saving languages, but I think we should make sure the way we go about it is the best for everyone, including the language. =] Although to be fair I haven't put a LOT of thought into it myself, so my thoughts that outsiders could muddle things up could also be incorrect!

[@thelingspace]

Yep, the focus is to help people in the cultures maintain their languages and the traditions around them! And the Language Conservancy is focused on working with the communities to help them succeed. I think learning the language as someone from outside the community is still a positive thing, as it allows you to help out more, and for some of these languages, there are so few remaining speakers, joining the speaking community is probably good. But for purposes of the cultural ties of the language, I think it's better to make it easier for people in the community to get to using it more. ^_^

[@ARTiculations]

And - in the parallel universe that we are forever shifting in and out of, they are also helping to translate the Berenstein bears into Cherokee. Hehehehe :P

[@thelingspace]

Haha, yeah. That's a really interesting phenomenon, I find it fascinating. ^_^

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

Such a basic question, but I am not overly familiar with the topic. Why exactly are 3000 languages expected to die in the next 100 years? Also, does this mean that a lot of languages are getting more popular over time?

[@thelingspace]

Sure, that's a fair point. There are cases where language death is caused by straight-up genocide, but more often, it is the product of political or cultural forces. Some of these are basically the long term effect of policies put in place by governments to restrict usage of particular languages; some of these are part of a cycle where people don't expose / teach their kids their ancestral languages, or those kids don't see the point of using those languages, because they don't see the utility of them. Often, it is a mix of these. The Linguistic Society of America has a good pamphlet about this: www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/Endangered_Languages_0.pdf It is true as well that some languages are picking up more people, yes. And they're the ones that you'd probably expect, languages that serve as lingua francas in various areas: English, Spanish, Arabic, etc. That said, though, in many cases, the number of people left speaking these languages that are dying don't have enough speakers to really influence that count; those gains are the product of similar forces, but they're not directly linked like that. Hope this helps! ^_^

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

The Ling Space It does help. A lot of what you wrote reminds me of what's happened in Uganda over the years. My roots are Indian, but my family is born in Uganda. My grandparents speak Swahili at a decent level since when they lived in Uganda, it was spoken there. However, my family left Uganda in 1972. In 2012, we all went back to Uganda, and to my grandparents surprise, Swahili was not spoken by many people anymore. Instead, people spoke Luganda. My grandpa said that roughly 3/10 people he spoke with could speak Swahili. So basically 1 language gained a lot of popularity while the other lost some. Thanks for the detailed response :-)

[@et5896]

Actually, the loss of a language is not necessarily the loss of a culture. Take for example, The Caribbean. The Afro-Caribbean population doesn't speak Yoruba, Igbo, or any other African language. But despite this, their culture is quite similar to the Nigerian one.