Students Bob Rivera and Anna Krezan of the University of New Mexico ESL/Bilingual Summer Institute have posted a short paper on Hawaiian Pidgin with a lot of links. Their paper, Hawaiian Pidgin/Creole: Pidgin to the Max provides an overview of Hawaiian Pidgin resources on the internet.
Kristin Denham’s Linguistics 204 course handout provides an organized list of Hawaiian Pidgin examples.
Lisa Conathan of the University of California, Berkeley has produced an online database of Arapho texts as part of her Arapaho Language: Documentation and Revitalization project.
Dr. Andrew Cowell and his students at the University of Colorado have produced The Arapaho Project, an example of a rich preservation project that includes language and culture.
Ethnologue of SIL presents the Iroquoian language family.
Nettle and Romaine (Vanishing Voices 2000) describe a biological wave that accompanied European expansion. It is no accident that indigenous languages in the US, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina are threatened today. European expansion has been constrained by geography and ecology (Nettle and Romaine 125).
Robert Fraser discusses the environmental changes associated with the introduction of sheep into Australia in his talk Environmental Aspects of Vegetarianism: The Australian Experience.
National Geographic sponsors a project called Enduring Voices, and they have just released a report to the press.
The map of geographical areas that show a great deal of langauge loss indicates severe language loss in temperate zones. This supports the biological wave thesis of Nettle and Romaine (Vanishing Voices 2000): “The European expansions created ‘neo-Europes,’ with primarily European peoples, landscapes of European crops and animals, and, of course European languages. These neo-Europes were mainly around the latitudes of Europe itself, on either side of the equator.” (p. 125).
The New York Times (9/19/07) has a story on the press release: Languages Die, but Not Their Last Words. Notice the focus of the Times article on the traditional ‘dictionary and text’ model for language preservation: “Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.”
In the To the Editor section, Ellen Lutz of Cultural Survival criticizes the Times and National Geographic for their shallow, colonial (?) approach. Lutz notes, “Outside efforts to “preserve” language often undermine native peoples’ revitalization efforts, since they compete for the time and energy of a tiny number of elderly speakers. “
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers an overview of linguistic relativity, including a handful of quotes about language and thought from Sapir and Whorf. The SEP presents linguistic relativity in the larger context of Relativism.
One of the two claims of the linguistic relativity hypothesis is “The structure and lexicon of one’s language influences how one perceives and conceptualizes the world, and they do so in a systematic way.”
To test the hypothesis, we must answer at least the question, “Which aspects of language influence which aspects of thought in some systematic way?”
Here’s a site designed to help kids learn about neuroscience. Scroll down and read about aphasia.
Paul Broca and Karl Wernike pioneered brain function research. Damage to Broca’s area can cause expressive or motor aphasia. People with expressive aphasia omit function words and morphemes. Damage to Wernicke’s area can cause sensory or receptive aphasia. People with sensory aphasia have trouble understanding spoken and written language and may make nonsensical utterances.
M.K. Holder presents a brief outline of brain lateralization and language function. Dr. Holder’s site is mostly concerned with handedness.
Ages and Stages: Developmental Milestones
Caroline Bowen presents a nice outline of the receptive and productive milestones of language acquisition.
Charles Hockett developed several lists of the design features of communication systems, settling on thirteen.
Kenneth Hyde presents the 13 features in graphic form on his site The Features of Human Language.