IronMike wrote:I got Dutch, but I clicked on the white card thing and got Hungarian. What's that mean? Can I do either?
Yes you can do either. I first got Macedonian and got Tamil on my whitecard.
IronMike wrote:I got Dutch, but I clicked on the white card thing and got Hungarian. What's that mean? Can I do either?
Ketutar wrote:Registration is open for the "Indigenous Language Jam" challenge
http://languagejam.net/sites/register.php
"The first challenge includes: Ainu, Bininj Kunwok, Cherokee, Cree, Faroese, Fijian, Guaraní, Inuktitut, Kurmanji, Latvian, Lezgi, Low German, Manx, Maori, Mari, Navajo, Nepali, Northern Sami, Ojibwe, Quileute, Samoan, Scottish Gaelic, Sundanese, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zarma."
lavengro wrote:Ketutar wrote:Registration is open for the "Indigenous Language Jam" challenge
http://languagejam.net/sites/register.php
"The first challenge includes: Ainu, Bininj Kunwok, Cherokee, Cree, Faroese, Fijian, Guaraní, Inuktitut, Kurmanji, Latvian, Lezgi, Low German, Manx, Maori, Mari, Navajo, Nepali, Northern Sami, Ojibwe, Quileute, Samoan, Scottish Gaelic, Sundanese, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zarma."
Thanks Ketutar, interesting!
I am surprised to see some of these languages in a list of indigenous languages.
indigenous
/ɪnˈdɪdʒɪnəs/
adjective: indigenous
originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native.
rdearman wrote:Why? They all originated somewhere.
Well, to me calling a language indiginous implies that it's a minority language that's unrelated to a colonial language that has become the majority language in the recent past.
Cèid Donn wrote:I'm planning on doing this LangJam.Well, to me calling a language indiginous implies that it's a minority language that's unrelated to a colonial language that has become the majority language in the recent past.
What?
I've been studying minority languages for over a decade and the terms "minority" and "indigenous" get swapped around, because so many indigenous languages are threatened or unprotected in their land of origin, but bottom line, indigenous means a language that is still spoken in the place where it originated. That's all. It has nothing to do with colonialism, although that is factor regarding the state of many indigenous languages worldwide, nor whether it's a minority/threatened language or not, although virtually all the world's most threaten languages are all both indigenous and minority languages, nor about cultural prestige in or outside of the place where it is spoken.
It seems pretty clear that the person(s) behind this theme wanted to encourage people to expand their experience with lesser studied or less popular indigenous languages. Curiosity about the world's almost 7000 still living languages is good! Not sure why this needs to be controversial.
A couple of fun tangential points since we're here:
1. Keep in mind that hardly any contemporary national borders today reflect of the cultural, ethnic or linguistic history of the people who are indigenous within those borders, and those borders can include many colonial conquests of the past that a lot people don't realize were colonized one way or another. As a student of Celtic languages, I get that a lot. But in addition to the more obvious colonized cultures and languages around the world, the Ainu, the Sami, all Celtic nations, the Basque, numerous ethnic groups in modern-day Russia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other modern-day countries--all colonized, and virtually all, with the notable exception of the Republic of Ireland (not counting Northern Ireland), are still colonized to this day, regardless of whatever political and cultural distinctions are made to explain away and gloss over this history of colonization.
2. Just because a language has a relatively large speaking population doesn't mean it's not threatened. Language decline can happen at a shocking fast pace. In the past, this typically involved tactics which today we recognize as genocide. But today, many languages face threats from the whims of the global economy, as well as English-centric technology and the internet. In Africa, native speakers of indigenous languages, including ones with large speaker populations like Yoruba, are struggling to get their books published in their own languages. In order to get published, many African writers have to adopt English. And in the case of a language like Faroese, there is so little technology that supports their language that many speakers must regularly rely on English in their day-to-day lives. These are recognized threats to our world's linguistic diversity, even for indigenous languages that seem to be doing OK right now.
indigenous
/ɪnˈdɪdʒɪnəs/
adjective: indigenous
originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native.
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