| BookwormMG |
Posted - February 15 2010 : 7:43:54 PM
That's a very interesting story, DWB, and of course sad as well. Any story entitled "the last of her tribe" should resonate here. The story led me to poke around on the Internet to see how many different languages survive. The answer is about 6,800 spoken languages, a much higher number than I would have guessed. But at least half of those are likely to be extinct by the end of this century, and of those, about 100 are spoken here in the U.S. Only 20 Native American languages are still spoken by all generations of a tribe. I'd guess Cherokee, Navajo -- not sure of the others.
Here's the website of an organization that's trying to stem the loss of American Indian languages:
http://www.ilinative.org
And note the short video, narrated by an honorary board member whose face will be instantly recognized by all of us. Not to mention his voice, especially when speaking Cherokee (I assume that's what it is) at the beginning of the narration. |
![The Mohican Board! [Bumppo's Redux!]](images/wwwboard.gif "The Mohican Board! [Bumppo's Redux!]")
