The Rising Ocean Will Extinguish More Than Land. It Will Kill Entire Languages
Virtually every endangered language is endangered because its community was systematically targeted by genocide, forced cultural assimilation, some kind of political marginalization. On a practical level, language diversity encodes the sum of human cultural, historical and ecological knowledge. As a species, we lose knowledge when we lose
... See moreMary Elizabeth Williams • Lily Gladstone's Acceptance Speech Shows Why We Need to Save Endangered Languages
"The Eyak word for rain means 'something is happening.'"
This quote comes a book by Eva Saulitis called "Into Great Silence." It's near the end of the book, where she talks about the Eyak people of the coastal rainforest of Alaska.
The Eyak are a distinct cultural group, separate from the Tlingit, that migrated thousands of years ago from the
... See moreThe loss of ancestral language not only means the extinction of cultural heritage, it is directly linked to our worldwide ecological collapse.