July 29, 2019

Indigenous Languages Explained (and the Real Meaning of No Woman, No Cry)

1 hour 9 minutes

This episode effortlessly covers the full language world, from Sean Paul to the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

via GIPHY

It's the United Nations Year of Indigenous Languages

Up to 95% of the world’s languages might be extinct or endangered by the end of the century. And most of them are indigenous, meaning that they spoken by the indigenous people of a region.

In this show, you'll discover

What’s an indigenous language?

Why does it matter so much that we preserve these languages?

Hint: Because it's a HUMAN RIGHT

Should any country at all have an official language?

And where do you start if you want to learn an indigenous language?

And we think you love a quiz as much as we do, so don't miss out the indigenous language quiz in this episode.

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Links:

Episode 37: The Secret Languages of Great Britain (with an expert from Omniglot) by Fluent Language
Language is Everything: Talking Language Activism with Wikitongues
UN information about indigenous languages
Language Stories
LangFest17 - Lindsay Willams - Why + how you should learn a language you've never heard of - YouTube
Emma Stevens - Blackbird by The Beatles sung in Mi'kmaq - YouTube
Wikitongues.org
Linguistic rights - Wikipedia
7000 Languages
Sean Paul: 'Language barrier' a problem for dancehall artists - BBC News
Jamaica's patois Bible: The word of God in creole - BBC News — A few Jamaican patois rules

Plural nouns are made with the word "dem" ("they" or "them" in English) - so the plural of "uoli prafit" ("holy prophet") is "uoli prafit dem", and the plural of "enimi" ("enemy") is "enimi dem"

The past tense is marked by the word "did" - so "he lived" is, in patois, "im did liv"

The future tense can be marked with " a go" or "wi" ("will") - "Im a go siev" is "He will save", and "Yu wi nuo" is "You will know"

The World's Most Controversial K-Pop Group - YouTube

Omniglot - the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages

Why Indigenous Languages Should Be Taught Alongside French and English - Chatelaine

Why cultural death is a shared loss | Inky Gibbens | TEDxCambridgeUniversity - YouTube

What Gets Easier When You Study More Languages? by Fluent Language

Talk To Me In Korean

The Add1 Challenge

The Alphabets : Atlas of Endangered Alphabets

Ethnologue: Languages of the World

...more

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By Kerstin Cable

4.6

134134 ratings