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Date: April 15, 2010
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. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
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. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
Cultural Survival was fortunate to have three Shuar visitors in February from the Ecuadorian Amazon. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
Swahili is a Bantu language spoken in a wide area of Africa. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
"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 whe |
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Date: April 9, 2010
Orang Asli are the original people of West Malaysia. Under federal law, they have no ownership rights to their traditional lands, despite having lived in Malaysia centuries longer than other groups. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
Italy, a land of distinctive culture, is also full of linguistic diversity. The language officially spoken today is a convention of the 19(th) century Accademia della Crusca, which emerged after the wars of unification (Risorgimento) (circa 1848-1861). At that time, the intent was to forge an Italian people by forcing them to speak one standard language. This effort was only partially successful. Today within Italy's borders one can find pockets of minority languages like Sardinian, Albanian, and Friulan. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
The Lakota language in South Dakota is currently facing a process of attrition similar to that of many native languages around the world. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
There were about 300 indigenous languages spoken in Australia before Europeans occupied the continent, with the number of speakers of each language varying between a hundred and a few thousand. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
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. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
Quechua has been spoken in Perú since it became the unifying language of the Inca Empire 600 years ago. As the most widely spoken autochthonous language of Perú, it is considered to be an official language along with Spanish. Statistics vary, but the number of Quechua speakers in Perú is estimated at four and a half million, approximately 19 percent of the total population. (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática: Censos Nacionales 1993) Some regions are predominantly Quechua speaking. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
Native American languages are disappearing. In Oklahoma last year, only 127 Pawnee (six percent) spoke their Native language; all were elderly. |
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Date: April 9, 2010
Alexander M. Ervin
Allyn and Bacon, Boston. 2000.
ISBN 0-321-05690-6 (paperback)
REVIEWED BY IAN S. McINTOSH |
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Date: April 2, 2010
"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. |
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Date: April 2, 2010
How would it feel to be the last speaker of your language on earth? |
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Date: April 2, 2010
When Donald Marshall Jr. dipped his eel nets into a Nova Scotia river, he knew exactly what he was doing. The Mi'kmaq man harvested close to 500 pounds of eels, then sold his catch. Soon afterward, he was charged by federal fisheries officers with fishing out of season, fishing with illegal nets, and selling illegal fish. Marshall Jr. took the government to court. He maintained that according to the contents of a specific treaty, he had the right to fish for a living. After years of appeals, Marshall Jr. |
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Date: April 2, 2010
With burning wood scenting the spring air, the elder chanted softly:
God of trees, god of the earth, god of river, god of water, god of wind, god of clouds, god of the heavens, gods residing in the mountains of this area, god of seas, god of the bear: To all these gods, please descend on this land. Please make our wishes true. |
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Date: April 2, 2010
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Date: April 2, 2010
Gonzalo Oviedo & Luisa Maffi, with Peter Bille Larsen
WWF International - Terralingua, Switzerland. 2000.
Appendices and maps.
ISBN 2-88085-247-1 (paperback)
REVIEWED BY TAKI MIYAMOTO |
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Date: April 2, 2010
It is Oct. 3, 2000, and a full day since I boarded a jeep to travel nine hours into the jungles of central India. The forests abound with the chattering of monkeys, parrots, and giant gliding squirrels. Eventually, my jeep staggers onto a dirt path leading to Hemalkasa, a village belonging to the Madais.. |
