25.2 (Summer 2001) Endangered Languages, Endangered Lives

The Djenne Project, Mali: Jean Louis Bourgeois, Coordinator

The Djenné Project, Mali: Jean Louis Bourgeois, Coordinator

The Djenné mosque -- the world's largest adobe structure -- and surrounding town rank with Tombouctou (Timbuktu) and the famous Dogon (Bandiagara) Escarpment as the most important of Mali's tourist attractions. The town now faces disaster as plans for an upstream dam progress.

Inhabited since the third century B.C., Djenné became a market center vital to the trans-Saharan gold trade and then a spiritual center for the dissemination of Islam.

The Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures

We writers and scholars from all regions of Africa gathered in Asmara, Eritrea from January 11 to 17, 2000 at the conference titled Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century. This is the first conference on African languages and literatures ever to be held on African soil, with participants from East, West, North, Southern Africa and from the diaspora, and attended by writers and scholars from around the world. We examined the state of African languages in literature, scholarship, publishing, education, and administration in Africa and throughout the world.

Shuar Visit Cultural Survival

Cultural Survival was fortunate to have three Shuar visitors in February from the Ecuadorian Amazon. Professor Basco Atamaint, National Executive Director of the Shuar Federation; Profesor Aurora Wamputsar, who works in bilingual Shuar education; and Kar Atamaint, a student at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and also the leader and founder of the new Intercultural Dialogue Project, came to the Cultural Survival office in Cambridge to talk about the recent indigenous-led protests in Quito.

Recreating a Language: a socio-historical approach to the study of Shaba Swahili

Swahili is a Bantu language spoken in a wide area of Africa. In East Africa, it is spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the southern part of Somalia; in central Africa, one hears it in Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), also known as the former Zaire; in Southern Africa, it is spoken in Zambia and Mozambique. Used by people in ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse areas, it provides a wide continuum of dialects (for dialect details, see Nurse & Hinnebusch, 1993).

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."

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