Dan's Blog

Language Genocide

Posted Fri, 02/12/2010 - 16:53

What is really happening with the world’s languages?

As of 2007, Michael E. Krauss, a renowned linguist, estimated that there are about 6000 languages in active use. Of those, how many have a writing system? How many will last more than 100 years? According to Krauss, 60-80% of these languages will not be spoken by children in the next 100 years and 15-30% of the world’s languages are currently moribund – they have no young speakers, and will most likely die with the passing of the older generation.[1] But why is this such a big deal?

Another new blog

Posted Fri, 01/22/2010 - 16:29

I have decided to move my blog over to Drupal, since it is kind of pointless to try to maintain a wordpress site and a Drupal site, and because I think there should be some kind of consistency in design between the two.  I think that I will use this blog to post updates on my Korean Corpus project, my life in general, and anything else interesting that I would like to share with the world.  I have so far been utterly unsuccessful at keeping a blog (just as I have been unsuccessful in keeping a journal), but I'll give it another shot here.