October 12, 2001
Linguists Collect Unpublished Information on Dying Languages for a Database
Five or six languages die every year, experts say. Within two centuries, 40 percent of the world's extant languages may be gone. These are sobering numbers for a linguist like Anthony Aristar, an associate professor at Wayne State University. "It really is a desperate situation now," he says. "If you lose your language, you've lost your culture."
Mr. Aristar heads E-MELD, the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data, a project that aims to combat the growing problem of
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