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Endangered Languages Project

The Endangered Languages Project (ELP) is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization and online collaborative platform focused on supporting the documentation, revitalization, and preservation of Indigenous and other endangered languages worldwide through knowledge sharing, resource aggregation, and community networking.^[1] Launched on June 21, 2012, with initial funding from a 2011 U.S. National Science Foundation grant and development support from Google.org, the project originated as a collaboration between the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Eastern Michigan University's Institute for Language Information and Technology (LINGUIST List).^[1]^[2] Its founding partners include the First Peoples' Cultural Council (FPCC) of British Columbia and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Linguistics, with additional key collaborators such as the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the First Peoples' Cultural Foundation.^[1]^[2] The platform's core mission emphasizes building networks among linguists, indigenous communities, and language advocates to mobilize research capacity, sustain linguistic diversity, and generate evidence-based assessments of language vitality, addressing the risk to over 3,000 endangered languages that represent roughly half of the world's total.^[1]^[2] Key features include the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat), an open-access database contributed to by academic institutions; a repository of over 7,000 digital resources such as audio samples, manuscripts, and videos; and tools for over 22,000 registered language champions to connect and share revitalization strategies.^[1] Free offerings encompass workshops, online courses, and mentorship programs, with the project transitioning to independent nonprofit status in 2024 after relocating to the University of Hawaiʻi in 2015.^[1] Recognized as the largest online community for endangered language efforts, ELP facilitates peer-to-peer support and international collaboration without evident major controversies, prioritizing empirical documentation over ideological framing.^[1]

History

Inception and Google Involvement (2012)

In June 2012, Google announced the launch of the Endangered Languages Project, an online platform aimed at compiling and disseminating information on over 3,000 languages facing extinction.^[2]^[3] The initiative, spearheaded by Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm, sought to create a centralized resource featuring language profiles with empirical details such as speaker population estimates, geographic maps, vitality assessments, and multimedia content including videos of native speakers.^[4]^[5] The platform emphasized crowdsourcing to build a database grounded in verifiable documentation, enabling linguists, researchers, and community members to upload textual, audio, and visual records rather than prioritizing interpretive advocacy.^[6]^[7] Initial development involved partnerships with academic linguists and indigenous groups to ensure data accuracy, focusing on quantifiable metrics like intergenerational transmission rates and endangerment levels derived from field observations, without unsubstantiated claims of inherent cultural value.^[4]^[8] This approach positioned the project as a tool for factual cataloging, leveraging Google's technological infrastructure for global accessibility while deferring long-term stewardship to domain experts.^[2]

Expansion and Nonprofit Transition (2013–2016)

Following the initial launch in 2012, the Endangered Languages Project underwent a structured expansion from 2013 to 2016, marked by the consolidation of governance independent of direct Google oversight and the deepening of academic partnerships. In late 2012, Google.org had transferred platform control to the ELP Governance Council, chaired by the First Peoples' Cultural Council (FPCC), enabling a collaborative model that prioritized input from indigenous language organizations. This shift facilitated resource enhancements, including expanded access to audio samples and documentation tools derived from field surveys, addressing immediate needs for communities documenting languages under demographic pressures such as intergenerational transmission failure, where speaker numbers often fell below 1,000 in isolated regions per UNESCO-aligned ethnolinguistic data integrated into the platform.^[1] A pivotal milestone occurred in 2014, when the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat)—the project's core database—entered its second phase, with research operations and website hosting fully transferred to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM) Department of Linguistics. This transition from multi-institutional prototyping to UHM stewardship allowed for scaled data aggregation, incorporating vitality assessments that quantified economic drivers of shift, such as migration to urban centers reducing heritage language use by up to 50% in affected groups based on longitudinal surveys. The FPCC's role as founding partner emphasized practical revitalization applications, fostering uploads of community-generated materials like orthography guides and basic phrasebooks.^[9]^[1] By 2015, the project's operational base had relocated to UHM, formalizing the U.S.-centric infrastructure while maintaining global outreach through the Governance Council. This period saw the platform's maturation into a hub for revitalization resources, with added sections on causal analyses of endangerment—drawing from verifiable metrics like speaker age distributions and economic assimilation rates from sources such as the Ethnologue database—without endorsing unsubstantiated policy narratives. In 2016, enhancements included searchable indices for over 2,500 languages with vitality scales, enabling users to cross-reference shift factors like resource scarcity in rural economies against successful intervention case studies, though efficacy varied by local implementation fidelity.^[9]^[10]

Recent Developments (2017–2025)

In 2023, the Endangered Languages Project launched its Language Revitalization Mentors Program on International Mother Language Day, providing free virtual one-on-one guidance from experienced mentors fluent in eleven languages to support communities in documentation and revitalization efforts.^[11] The program emphasizes practical outcomes, with mentors tracking participant progress through customized plans and resources tailored to community needs, such as developing concrete revitalization strategies.^[12] By 2025, the initiative expanded to include the Ready to Revitalize online course, a free project-based program enrolling 20 participants from January to March, where learners collaborate with mentors to create actionable language plans and evaluate their implementation empirically via progress milestones.^[13] Complementary efforts featured youth-focused activities, including the first Ayta Magbukun language camp in Bataan Province, Philippines, in May 2025, which gathered young speakers for immersive sessions to build fluency and document oral traditions, with follow-up assessments of retention rates.^[14] Technological advancements involved cautious integration of AI, with the project issuing a July 2024 statement prohibiting the use of large language models for data mining on its hosted materials to preserve community control over linguistic resources.^[15] Related Google experiments, such as the 2025 update to Woolaroo—a mobile tool using computer vision to identify objects and provide vocabulary in 30 endangered languages like Maya and Rapa Nui—served as open-source supplements, enabling communities to expand word lists and audio recordings independently while aligning with the project's core database priorities.^[16] Amid global displacements from conflicts, the project responded through its "Ask ELP" advice column, offering data-driven guidance in a September 2025 entry on sustaining revitalization in war-affected areas, where mentor Pius Nakweesi advocated prioritizing portable digital archives and community-led oral transmission over infrastructure-dependent methods to maintain empirical continuity in speaker numbers and usage.^[17] This approach focused on verifiable metrics, such as pre- and post-displacement fluency surveys, to adapt strategies without relying on external aid symbolic of broader geopolitical narratives.^[18]

Objectives and Methodology

Core Aims

The Endangered Languages Project seeks to compile and share empirical data on the vitality of languages at risk of extinction, prioritizing verifiable metrics such as speaker population sizes, intergenerational transmission rates, and geographic distribution to assess endangerment levels objectively.^[1] This cataloging effort targets the approximately 3,000 languages identified as endangered out of the world's roughly 7,000 spoken tongues, where nearly half face imminent loss based on these quantitative indicators rather than subjective cultural valuations.^[9] By focusing on data-driven documentation, the project enables informed analysis of language shift patterns, recognizing that many cases arise from speakers' pragmatic adaptations to dominant languages for socioeconomic advantages, such as access to education and markets, rather than coercive erasure alone.^[19] A secondary aim involves facilitating information exchange among linguists, communities, and researchers to support community-initiated revitalization efforts, without presuming external interventions can override local incentives for language maintenance.^[20] The project underscores that successful preservation hinges on endogenous speaker decisions and resource allocation, as evidenced by cases where transmission fails despite documentation due to demographic pressures like urbanization and low birth rates among fluent speakers.^[1] This approach avoids idealized narratives of linguistic diversity as an inherent good, instead grounding objectives in causal factors like opportunity costs in multilingual environments where majority languages confer survival benefits.^[9] Ultimately, these aims promote transparency in tracking language vitality through open-access resources, allowing stakeholders to evaluate endangerment trends empirically and prioritize efforts where data indicate viable pathways for continuity, such as regions with residual fluent populations capable of transmission.^[19]

Data Collection and Revitalization Tools

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat), maintained by the Endangered Languages Project, serves as a central crowdsourced database aggregating data on approximately 7,000 languages, with a focus on those at risk of extinction.^[9] Data is compiled from published sources such as books, articles, and censuses, alongside inputs from individuals and organizations through global networks, though the project conducts no primary fieldwork itself.^[9] Contributions are reviewed by an international board to ensure reliability, drawing on established frameworks like UNESCO's vitality assessments and Ethnologue's speaker estimates to populate language profiles.^[9] ^[21] These profiles include details on speaker populations, intergenerational transmission rates, domains of use, and trends in vitality, enabling users to identify patterns such as declining usage tied to demographic shifts.^[9] Vitality is quantified via the Language Endangerment Index (LEI), a scoring system (0-5 scale) emphasizing four weighted factors: absolute number of speakers, recent trends in speaker populations, degree of intergenerational transmission, and prevalence across social domains.^[9] This index prioritizes transmission as the primary causal driver of endangerment, reflecting empirical observations that languages persist when actively passed to younger generations rather than through passive archival alone.^[9] The platform also incorporates multimedia elements, such as user-submitted audio samples, texts, and videos, into a collaborative resource library to document phonetic and syntactic features for analysis and replication efforts.^[14] Revitalization tools emphasize practical, data-driven mechanisms over anecdotal successes, including downloadable guides like the "Revitalizing Endangered Languages: A Practical Guide," which outlines strategies for community-led documentation, curriculum development, and usage monitoring based on observable metrics such as speaker engagement rates.^[22] The project's mentor program pairs revitalization practitioners with experienced language champions for one-on-one guidance, focusing on tracking progress through quantifiable indicators like increased hours of daily use or apprentice fluency levels, rather than subjective self-reports.^[12] Geographic and demographic integration features interactive maps displaying language locations alongside speaker distributions, underscoring factors like isolation in remote areas—where small populations face inherent transmission barriers due to limited interlocutors—as a structural contributor to endangerment, independent of external historical pressures.^[9] These tools facilitate targeted interventions by correlating low-density speaker clusters with higher LEI risk scores, supporting evidence-based prioritization of resources for dispersed communities.^[9]

Integration of Technology

The Endangered Languages Project utilizes a digital collaborative platform to enable remote documentation, allowing speakers and researchers in isolated communities to upload verifiable audio recordings, videos, music, and academic papers directly to an online resource library. This feature addresses logistical barriers such as geographic isolation and limited funding for fieldwork by supporting global contributions without requiring physical presence, thereby improving data scalability and accessibility for over 3,000 cataloged endangered languages as of 2024.^[14]^[23] In limited capacities, the project incorporates supervised machine transcription and translation tools to process uploaded materials, but these are always verified against native speaker input to mitigate errors inherent in low-data language models. Official policy explicitly rejects generative AI or large language models for core tasks like data mining or content creation, citing ethical risks including violations of Indigenous data sovereignty and the unreliability of AI outputs—such as hallucinations—in under-resourced languages, as noted by executive director Anna Belew. The project prohibits scraping its resources for AI training datasets, underscoring a commitment to human oversight for accuracy.^[15]^[24] Technological integrations, while enhancing documentation efficiency, face inherent limitations in countering language endangerment, as tools alone cannot alter the socioeconomic pressures—such as economic disadvantages of non-dominant languages—that causally drive intergenerational shift, with UNESCO data showing over 40% of global languages at risk of extinction by 2100 due to such factors rather than documentation deficits. Over-reliance on tech risks diverting focus from community-driven revitalization, which empirical cases demonstrate as more effective for sustained use.^[25]

Organizational Structure

Leadership and Personnel

The Endangered Languages Project is directed by Executive Director Anna Belew, who began her tenure on April 1, 2024. Belew earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2020, with expertise in language documentation, revitalization, sociolinguistics, and language technology. She oversees the organization's operational strategy, including support for global language communities through resource mobilization and knowledge-sharing initiatives.^[26]^[27]^[28] Operational roles emphasize data integrity and technical support, exemplified by the Data Management Coordinator position held by Kavon Hooshiar. Hooshiar, a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics and web developer trained at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, manages the project's databases to ensure accurate cataloging of endangered language resources. This role focuses on maintaining empirical data standards amid the organization's small team structure of approximately 9–12 personnel.^[29]^[30]^[31] The project augments its core staff with interns recruited for targeted skill development in areas like data verification and resource curation. In the 2024–2025 academic year cycle, running from September 2024 to March 2025, three interns were selected to contribute hands-on efforts, drawing from diverse backgrounds to enhance operational capacity without formal compensation structures beyond experiential training.^[32]^[33]

Governance and Advisory Bodies

The Endangered Languages Project functions as a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, with its governance centered on a Governance Council that directs overall operations and strategic priorities. Established following the transfer of control from Google.org, the council assumed full authority in the project's early years to steer it toward independent, community-informed decision-making.^[1] This body comprises a select group of approximately eleven members, drawn from linguistics scholars, language revitalization practitioners, and indigenous advocates worldwide, ensuring oversight emphasizes empirical language documentation and vitality assessments rather than external political influences.^[34] Chaired by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council—a founding partner—the Governance Council shapes the project's mission by integrating expertise from diverse global representatives, including those affiliated with institutions like the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Linguistics. Members such as linguists Lyle Campbell and indigenous language specialists provide advisory input on catalog accuracy and revitalization strategies, prioritizing verifiable metrics like intergenerational transmission rates and speaker demographics to avoid unsubstantiated claims. Recent additions to the council, including Dr. Haʻalilio Solomon in 2025 and others welcomed in 2023, reflect ongoing efforts to incorporate fresh perspectives from endangered language communities for rigorous, evidence-based guidance.^[1]^[34]^[35] Complementing the council is an Advisory Committee of invited professionals, which offers specialized recommendations on technical and cultural matters, such as data validation protocols and ethical engagement with speakers. This dual structure promotes accountability through periodic council meetings—such as the November 2023 session hosted by the University of Hawaiʻi—and transparent reporting on progress toward catalog completeness, holding the project to standards of integrity in its interactions with language communities.^[1]^[35] The nonprofit model further enforces fiscal and operational oversight via standard board practices, including non-compensated council service, to maintain focus on linguistic preservation without commercial or ideological distortions.^[36]

Partnerships and Collaborations

The Endangered Languages Project maintains foundational partnerships with the First Peoples' Cultural Council (FPCC) and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Linguistics, established to facilitate resource sharing, expertise in Indigenous language revitalization, and collaborative infrastructure for global language documentation.^[1] These alliances have enabled the integration of community-driven data from FPCC's networks in British Columbia with academic linguistic methodologies from the University of Hawaiʻi, supporting the project's core platform for sharing revitalization tools and recordings.^[28]^[9] Beyond these origins, the project engages selective networks with international linguists, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations to validate endangerment assessments and standardize data formats, emphasizing alliances that yield measurable outputs such as verified language vitality metrics over broad inclusivity.^[9] For instance, collaborations with university-hosted governance councils, including those at the University of Hawaiʻi, have refined protocols for cross-verifying speaker counts and vitality stages through peer-reviewed contributions from global experts.^[35] Such partnerships prioritize empirical rigor, drawing on institutional repositories to cross-reference data against established linguistic benchmarks while avoiding unverified submissions.^[9]

Achievements and Data

Catalogued Languages and Resources

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) profiles over 3,000 endangered languages as of 2025, representing nearly half of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken globally.^[37] Each entry furnishes specific empirical data, including estimates of speaker populations, assessments of intergenerational transmission rates, prevailing domains of usage, and primary geographic locations.^[37] The project's resource library encompasses a diverse array of materials, such as revitalization toolkits designed for community implementation—including guides for language camp organization and planning templates—and multimedia assets like audio recordings and videos submitted by contributors.^[38] These resources are supplemented by community-driven content, including stories and responses in an advice column that capture practical experiences from language maintenance initiatives.^[38] Catalogued information receives ongoing refinements through the incorporation of verified inputs from published demographic sources, such as national censuses and linguistic surveys, alongside submissions from affected communities, all subjected to review by an international advisory board to accommodate shifts in speaker demographics and vitality indicators.^[37]

Specific Success Stories and Metrics

The Endangered Languages Project's resource repository has amassed over 7,000 uploads, encompassing audio recordings, video documentation, and educational tools that communities have leveraged to initiate local language maintenance programs.^[1] These materials have directly supported efforts such as mentor-led workshops, where participants record native speaker narratives and develop beginner curricula, resulting in measurable increases in archived content for targeted languages.^[1] Engagement through the project's mentor network has reached more than 22,000 language champions, facilitating pairings that yield follow-up activities like online fluency assessments and community training sessions.^[1] For instance, mentors have guided groups in uploading vernacular audio samples, with subsequent surveys indicating heightened participant involvement in daily language use within families and schools.^[39] Data from the project's Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) has informed policy advocacy, such as submissions to governmental bodies citing vitality metrics to secure funding for immersion programs, evidenced by post-engagement speaker self-reports showing modest upticks in usage hours.^[9] Nonetheless, ethnolinguistic assessments reveal that these gains primarily enhance documentation archives rather than achieve widespread revival, as fluent speaker populations for most cataloged languages persist in decline absent broader societal shifts.^[39]

Impact and Evaluation

Empirical Outcomes and Effectiveness

The Endangered Languages Project (ELP) primarily facilitates documentation and resource aggregation, yielding an archival repository that preserves linguistic data for over 3,400 languages and 7,000 resources as of 2024, but empirical assessments reveal limited causal effects on reversing language shift.^[1] The project's Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) employs the Language Endangerment Index (LEI) to evaluate vitality across approximately 7,000 languages, with nearly half classified as endangered; however, updates to these assessments, drawn from scholarly and community inputs since 2012, show persistent declines in speaker numbers and intergenerational transmission for most entries, with no documented widespread reversals attributable to ELP involvement.^[37] ^[40] Global longitudinal analyses of similar catalogued languages indicate that documentation efforts correlate with heightened awareness but fail to alter core shift dynamics, such as reduced first-language acquisition, in over 90% of cases.^[41] Cost-benefit evaluations of ELP-like initiatives highlight substantial investments in data collection and community connectivity—supported by initial grants like the 2011 U.S. National Science Foundation funding—against negligible gains in revival rates, often below 10% for stabilized usage in targeted languages.^[1] ^[42] These low outcomes stem from speakers' rational preferences for dominant languages offering superior economic and social opportunities, compounded by market-driven forces like urbanization and media dominance that accelerate shift independently of archival interventions.^[43] Documentation preserves corpora for potential future use but does not address the interpersonal and institutional factors required for vitality reversal, resulting in high upfront costs for marginal probabilistic benefits in active preservation.^[44] Comparisons to analogous projects, such as UNESCO's Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, underscore ELP's emphasis on information hubs: both generate verifiable metrics on endangerment (e.g., ELCat's LEI versus UNESCO's vitality scales) and foster 20,000+ global champions, yet neither demonstrates causal impacts beyond archival utility, with speaker base erosion continuing at rates of 2,500 languages projected lost by 2100 despite such platforms.^[1] ^[45] Realist syntheses of revitalization efforts confirm that hub-focused models like ELP excel in data dissemination but underperform in generating new speakers compared to immersion-based programs, where success hinges on community-led enforcement rather than centralized catalogs.^[46]

Broader Societal Implications

The documentation and cataloging facilitated by the Endangered Languages Project aids in archiving linguistic data amid the ongoing evolution of human languages, where dominant ones emerge through adaptive advantages in facilitating broader social, economic, and technological integration. Speakers often shift to widely used languages for practical gains, such as enhanced access to education, commerce, and information networks, mirroring selective pressures that favor communicative efficiency over isolated diversity.^[47] This process underscores that language attrition is frequently a rational response to environmental incentives rather than mere loss, preserving unique lexical or grammatical insights into cognition and ecology for scholarly analysis without mandating widespread revival.^[48] Linguistic diversity, while offering cultural depth and alternative conceptual frameworks, involves inherent trade-offs with societal efficiency, as fragmented repertoires elevate communication barriers and coordination expenses in multicultural contexts. Empirical assessments reveal that higher linguistic fragmentation correlates with reduced productivity in collaborative enterprises, due to translation overheads and misunderstandings that dilute collective output.^[49] Preservation initiatives thus contribute to balancing these dynamics by enabling targeted retention of high-value elements, such as irreplaceable ethnobiological terminologies, rather than uniform intervention across all cases. Realistic policy formulation benefits from such projects' data, prioritizing languages with demonstrable viability or exceptional scientific merit over egalitarian mandates that overlook the causal drivers of shift, including demographic decline and opportunity costs for minority speakers. Imposing preservation without regard for speakers' preferences or resource allocation can burden communities, akin to subsidizing cultural artifacts at the expense of adaptive progress, whereas evidence-based approaches foster sustainable outcomes by focusing on documentation as a low-cost hedge against total erasure.^[50]^[51] This perspective counters idealized views of perpetual multiculturalism by emphasizing empirical trade-offs, where global lingua francas enhance interoperability without negating selective heritage safeguarding.^[47]

Criticisms and Limitations

Critics of language preservation initiatives, including the Endangered Languages Project, argue that such efforts overemphasize documentation and archiving at the expense of confronting root causes of language shift, particularly economic incentives that drive assimilation to dominant languages offering superior market access and social mobility. Economic analyses highlight how minority language speakers rationally prioritize proficiency in high-utility languages to enhance labor market outcomes and intergenerational prospects, rendering archival projects insufficient without structural incentives to reverse these dynamics.^[52]^[53] Resource allocation in documentation-focused programs has been faulted for inefficiencies, directing funds toward low-usage digital repositories rather than scalable community interventions like immersion incentives or economic rewards for heritage language maintenance, which could yield higher revitalization returns. Studies underscore a persistent divide between documentation and revitalization, where archived materials often serve academic interests over practical community empowerment, limiting long-term speaker recruitment.^[44]^[54] Debates persist on the intrinsic value of universal preservation, with some scholars asserting that language attrition mirrors adaptive selection for efficient communication tools, and interventions distort this process by privileging cultural sentiment over empirical utility in resource-scarce environments. The project's quantitative catalogue explicitly acknowledges shortcomings in addressing qualitative dimensions, such as community experiences and emotional ties to language, potentially underrepresenting vitality factors beyond speaker counts.^[9] This framing has faced broader scrutiny for relying on biological extinction metaphors that obscure historical contingencies and overstate the tragedy of non-revival.^[55]

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A common language facilitates communication and economic efficiency, but linguistic diversity has economic and cultural value too.<|separator|>
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[PDF] Language as an Adaptation to the Cognitive Niche - Steven Pinker
Evolution is a change in gene frequencies, and the first prediction of the theory that language is an evolutionary adaptation is that there should be genes ...
[49]
Linguistic diversity and workplace productivity - ScienceDirect.com
While cultural diversity might improve productivity through new ideas and innovation, linguistic diversity might increase communication costs and thereby reduce ...
[50]
Are dying languages worth saving? - BBC News
Sep 15, 2010 · "To have a public policy that a certain culture or language should be preserved shows a fundamental misunderstanding.
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Should endangered languages be preserved, and at what cost?
Oct 12, 2017 · Preserving a minority language places a greater burden on people than does preserving a castle. We can preserve a castle by paying people to ...
[52]
[PDF] International Migration and the Economics of Language
This paper reviews the economics of language in international migration, focusing on language skills, proficiency, and consequences for labor market outcomes.Missing: criticisms | Show results with:criticisms
[53]
[PDF] The Economic Incentives of Cultural Transmission - HAL-SHS
Jan 11, 2021 · In this paper, we analyze how social and economic forces constrain the inter-generational transmission of culture among immigrants and their ...Missing: criticisms | Show results with:criticisms
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[PDF] The implications of language documentation for an endangered but ...
Documentation of an endangered language may be a short project that is carried out with urgency and with primarily academic benefits because the speakers ...Missing: efficacy | Show results with:efficacy
[55]
Refusing “Endangered Languages” Narratives | Daedalus | MIT Press
Aug 1, 2023 · It is common in Linguistics to categorize and theorize “endangered languages” through biological metaphors such as living and dying. This ...