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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."

Orang Asli at Odds with the Nation-State

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. When Malaysian officials or businessmen want Orang Asli land, they may bring in a bulldozer and flatten houses and gardens. Orang Asli, however, are most often dispossessed by legal maneuvers.

On the Brink: Griko; A Language of Resistance and Celebration

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.

Maintaining Lakota on the Cheyenne River Reservation

The Lakota language in South Dakota is currently facing a process of attrition similar to that of many native languages around the world. The older generation still consists of fluent first language speakers and commonly extends to 40- and 50-year-olds, while the younger generations can typically understand but no longer speak fluently. Many of today's youth and children can barely understand, and they speak very little or no Lakota. Lakota is not cool. It has been replaced by English, the language of multi-media and of modern life.

Looking For The Two-Way Street: Indigenous Australians Battle To Keep Their Languages Strong

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. As small language groups died out, others shifted to English, creole, or other indigenous languages. Speakers of traditional languages declined.

In 2001, perhaps 100 traditional languages are still spoken fluently, many by only a handful of elders. Within the next century, that number could drop to 10 or 20, or perhaps all could be lost.

Two-way school

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.

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