The last of the Lakota code-talkers

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_9668c6fe-7a8a-11df-ab6b-001cc4c002e0.html

One of these days I'll publish some good news.

Sorry for the lack of recent updates. There will be some (hopefully) soon.

A very sad day for Athabaskan linguistics and endangered languages in general.

http://newsminer.com/bookmark/6459797/article-Athabascan%20linguist-%20tradition%20bearer%20Katherine%20Peter%20dies%20

I had the good fortune of meeting Katherine my last night in Alaska; she and Jim Kari and Jim's wife Adelaide made an excellent salmon dinner and invited me to join them before my flight back to Illinois. She was very pleasant to talk to, and didn't seem fazed or bothered by my complete non-understanding of the conventions of Athabaskan-English discourse. She also gave me some beautiful pieces of beadwork for my wife and daughter.

My condolences to her family and colleagues.

Nice article. But they should be broadcasting in Salish, with the Olympics in Vancouver. :)

http://www.torontosun.com/sports/othersports/2010/02/18/12925026-sun.html

I'd love to see/hear this in Cree. Or Dene. Or Inuktitut. Or....

As I'm currently utterly swamped, The End of Words will see infrequent updating in the next month or so. In the meantime, here's UNESCO's Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=EN&pg=00139

The following article, on the loss of Bo (an Andaman Island language) was the direct inspiration for the creation of this blog. Obviously, I've been a follower of language-endangerment issues for quite a while, but this was the impetus I needed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8498534.stm

A bit odd to say, perhaps, but welcome to The End of Words, a blog about language death, language endangerment, language revitalization, and related issues. I hope to make this blog informative, useful, and enlightening with regard to the issues it addresses. Maybe, along the way, there will be some cause for hope amid this century's expected loss of more than 50% of the world's linguistic diversity.

Back in a bit.