25.2 (Summer 2001) Endangered Languages, Endangered Lives

Land Use and Fung-shui: Negotiation in the New Territories, Hong Kong

With the intensive rural development and increasing values in property from the late 1970s in Hang Kong, land administration became a more complicated task. The Government increasingly needed more land for future development, both industrial and residential; but the government's claim to indigenously-held land was strongly rejected by the land's owners and dwellers. One of the main grounds for challenging the government is fung-shui, or geomancy.

Plan A and Plan B Partnerships for Cultural Survival

"There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue in the comprehensive Porrua Spanish-Maya Dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that con be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies, six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth."

Can This Language be Saved?

Words are fascinating things. With meanings that expand and contract, they can be popularized, bought and sold in a linguistic marketplace, or, if denied access, they can be forced off the conversational road, never to be heard from again. Atapaka, for instance, was on someone's lips one hundred years ago, as were Wyandot, Galice, Nootsack, Salinan, Twana, and Lumbee. At the time, linguists documenting Native American languages noted that people spoke Chumash and Tonkawa with the same healthy conviction that we use Spanish, French, or English.

The Growing Shadow Of The Oroqen Language And Culture

Tucked away in the foothills of the Greater Hinggan mountains in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia lies Alihe, a city of quite modest size by Chinese standards, with a population of around fifty thousand. Alihe's main street, one of four paved roads in the city, stretches for about a mile and is flanked by the mounuments of communist China -- gray and white concrete buildings in varying states of disrepair. Ten of fifteen smaller roads intersect the main thoroughfare, all of them eventually leading to what seem endless rows of brick, wood, and packed earth houses.

You are a Dead People

"You are a dead people." This is what I hear when someone calls my language dead. Just what is language? The answer to this question will vary wildly depending on whom you ask. For many of those who have written and spoken on this matter, the answer has been that a given language is the core of that culture, and that the culture cannot survive without its language. This answer cannot be the only answer. Another truth is made apparent to me through my own experience.

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