Half of living languages face extinction

You'll never again hear anyone speaking Laghu, and anyone yearning to communicate in Old Kentish Sign Language is out of luck: it, too, has gone the way of the dodo. But there's still a chance to track down a conversation in Gamilaraay, or Southern Pomo – if you're prepared to trek to visit to one the few native Americans still speaking it in California. Of the 6,500 living languages currently being used around the world, around half are expected to be extinct by the end of this century.

It was concern about the cultural and historical losses that result from a language disappearing that inspired the World Oral Literature Project, an online collection of some of the 3,500-plus "endangered languages" struggling for survival in the world.

The heart of the project, run by Cambridge University, is a large database listing thousands of languages alongside details such as where they are spoken and by whom, plus audio clips. On the site, surfers can discover that Laghu was a language spoken in the Solomon Islands until it disappeared in 1984, Old Kentish Sign Language was a precursor to the modern-day version, and Gamilaraay is still used by the Kamilaroi tribe of New South Wales.

The project is the brainchild of Mark Turin, 37, a research associate at Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He grew up in London speaking Dutch and English and had planned to study linguistics at university, but on a gap year in Nepal realised he was interested in "what language unlocked, not just the nuts and bolts of linguistics", and switched to anthropology.

"We know very little about most of the world's languages, and an incredible amount about the histories and changes of a handful of western European languages," Turin explains. And he has devoted his academic career to trying to open up little-known languages. "Most endangered languages are primarily oral, and are vehicles for the transmission of a great deal of oral culture," he says. "That's at risk of being lost when speakers abandon their languages in favour of regional, national or international tongues."

So the World Oral Literature Project aims to document vanishing languages – and everything about the culture and society they convey – before they disappear. Its database used three major sources to collate the information about the disappearing languages, including Unesco's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. About 150 of its listed languages are in an "extremely critical" condition, where the number of known living speakers has slipped to single figures, or even just one.

"As soon as a scholar declares a language to be extinct, you get a phone call from someone furious who says 'my mother still speaks it'," Turin says. "But in a way, these corrections are all part of the process of drawing attention to the cause and the sense of urgency involved in careful documentation and description of endangered speech forms the world over."

The project also provides funds for local fieldworkers in countries including Malawi, India, Mongolia and Colombia to collect data and recordings about little-spoken languages. In the past, Turin says, major collections of recordings were lost because they weren't deemed important. He sees the new site as a "safe haven" for fieldwork on languages that might otherwise be lost. "The vast majority of tapes are just kept in dusty boxes, but to put them on our database we digitise and hopefully future-proof them," he adds.

"All manner of people have been getting in touch to give us their collections, including missionaries, retired scholars and community activists." One early donor was Reverend John Whitehorn, a former missionary and Cambridge linguist who lived with an indigenous community in Taiwan in the 1950s. "When he came back to England, he walked into Cambridge's Museum of Anthropology and said, 'I've got books, textiles and tape recordings, are you interested?' The museum took it all apart from the recordings because they didn't know what to do with them," Turin explains. "He went home and stored his collection around the house in plastic carrier bags, where they stayed until he walked into my office with the bags under his arm, and asked, 'do you want them now?' The tapes are brilliant, with songs and interviews and linguistic information that might otherwise have disappeared."

The database is currently updated exclusively by academics (though users are encouraged to send in contributions), but Turin hopes that it will ultimately become a Wikipedia-style web 2.0 project "that people want to contribute to", with user uploads, recordings and discussion to help keep languages alive. To that aim, Turin organises lectures and workshops for linguists, librarians, academics and members of the public to discuss the best strategies for collecting and protecting languages and their research.

But he worries that, in academia, funding pressures mean the importance of languages is being overlooked. "These days, students are in a huge rush to finish their PhDs due to time and funding requirements," he says. "They often don't have the time to develop a linguistic awareness for the people they're studying, and have to rely on interpreters and translators. But it's just not the same."

Turin is used to hearing sceptics dismiss the research. "I get a lot of people saying that they think this work is pointless as all minority languages that have no utility are better off dying off anyway – a kind of social Darwinian position," he says. "But I usually ask them whether they feel the same about all the old churches and buildings that Heritage Lottery money is helping to restore – or the plight of species around the world. Our work means we're helping not only endangered languages to stay with us, but all the culture and history that they denote."
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www.oralliterature.org/database