UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger

This Atlas is the result of an international collaboration of more than thirty linguists from around the world, some of whom had already been involved in the previous two editions. The editor-in-chief is Christopher Moseley, whose works include the Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages (London: Routledge 2007) and the […]

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Glottolog Data Explorer

The aim of this web application is to draw attention to the pressing issue of language endangerment. We hope that the map illustrates the huge number of distinct languages around the world in the present day, and implies that there is much to be lost, socially and culturally, if the […]

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Joseph Bruchac and the Lasting Power of Oral Traditions

Note: I had the pleasure of working with Joe Bruchac and his family while serving as the Education Director of the Ndakinna Education Center (a cultural arts non-profit in Upstate New York). His stories have played a notable role in my own family – my sons were raised listening to […]

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Technology and the Transmission of Oral Tradition in the Contemporary Jewish Community

This paper focuses on the impact of technology (computers, the Internet, iPods) on the transmission of oral tradition, specifically the cantillation of the Torah, in the contemporary Jewish community. The highly detailed and musically nuanced public recitation of the Torah require that the reader memorize both the pronunciation of unvocalized Hebrew text and the […]

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Preserving of Information Value in Oral Tradition of Minangkabau society, West Sumatera, Indonesia

Minangkabau society is very well known of their oral tradition named kaba babarito that expresses a message from one to others orally. Oral tradition of Minangkabau is very strong in many aspects of life, for example the tradition of maota di lapau (chatting on lapau), which is one way for […]

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The Glottolog Data Explorer: Mapping the world’s languages

We present THE GLOTTOLOG DATA EXPLORER, an interactive web application in which the world’s languages are mapped using a JavaScript library in the ‘Shiny’ framework for R (Chang et al., 2016). The world’s languages and major dialects are mapped using coordinates from the Glottolog database (Hammarström et al., 2016). The […]

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