ENDANGERED LANGUAGES

MODERN UNIVERSITY OF BUSINESS AND SCIENCE

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES

Prepared by: Rana Aboul Hosn

Supervised by: Manal Ahmad

December- 2018

Aley, Lebanon
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Isn’t it beautiful to just sit and try to figure out how language was invented at some point in

people’s life? And isn’t it strange to imagine our time with no use of language? Human have

been able to speak languages for 2 million years. It’s the essence of life, for it has made

communication easier and development took place since then. Some of these languages are used

worldwide; some were found but forgotten in a way, while others are being defended in different

ways just to stay.

Any culture could be lost when its language disappears or even gets forgotten, it takes with it

the knowledge, science, and even history. Talking about endangered languages, we have two

languages with an unknown destiny which are Siletz and Koro.The Siletz language is a form of

Tolowa language. It’s historically spoken by the confederated tribes of Siletz Indians on the

Siletz Indian Reservation in Oregon. Officially extinct, it’s reinvigorated from an excerpt of

14000 words taught in the school programs. A tribe of around 5000 people keeps the Siletz

language remaining, whereas Koro is a masked northeastern Indian language spoken by roughly

1000 people which subsets on hunting and farming.

According to research published by (Dan Morrison) on Nationalgeographic.com and a study

done by Gregory Anderson, Koro is found to be a language that lacks a lot of documentation.

Harrison found the origin of Koro as enigmatic but follows by saying that Koro won’t survive

when there’s no reinvigoration efforts are being made which shows how much this language is

endangered.
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On the other hand, Mr. Harrison and his colleagues at Nationalgeographic’s enduring voices

project unveiled a set of online talking dictionaries, that for the first time can document the

sound of a native American language in Oregon called Siletz Dee-ni. Mr. Harrison recruited its

last fluent speaker named Bud Lane. Mr. Lane recorded more than 14000 vocabulary entries

hardly, documenting in his voice the language properly. Mr. Lane in an interview submitted that

Siletz is being saved by over 10000 words and phrases in an online talking dictionary. In hopes

of laying out such a departing language, the database is simplified and preserved in dictionaries

for the next generations.

An Arab proverb says” Learn a language, and you’ll avoid a war.” By learning new language,

we’re getting a step closer to peace in addition to the discoverability of self intelligence and

harmoniously living with each other.

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References

Dan Morrison. (OCTOBER 6, 2010) "Hidden" Language Found in Remote Indian Tribe
Retrieved from: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/101005-lost-
language-india-science/

Professor K. David Harrison (Oct. 17, 2014) Disappearing Languages. Retrieved from:

https://humanities.byu.edu/disappearing-languages/

Shmid, Randolph E. (2010) https://phys.org/news/2010_10-undocumented-language-hidden-

india.html