Endangered Languages Flashcards

Vocabulary and key concept flashcards based on the Reading Passage 3 text regarding endangered languages and linguistic research.

Megalanguages

A handful of dominant languages, such as Mandarin, English, and Spanish, that are replacing the vast majority of the world's 6,000 to 7,000 languages.

Creole

A language developed from a mixture of two different languages.

Peter Monaghan

A graduate of the Australian National University who coined the phrase, 'Never mind whales, save the languages'.

Nick Evans

A leading Australian authority on Aboriginal languages who emphasizes that transitioning to a creole causes the loss of rich landscape vocabulary and cultural knowledge.

Peter Austin

An Australian linguist who directs language loss limitation efforts at the University of London and heads a program training documentary linguists.

Michael Krauss

An endangered-language specialist at the University of Alaska who has spent over 30 years arguing that linguists play with non-essentials while raw data disappears.

Noam Chomsky

A prominent theoretical linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose 1957 work proposed that all human languages share universal grammatical features encoded in the mind.

Theoretical linguists

Linguists who focus on universal grammatical features and draw general conclusions about how languages work rather than describing specific languages.

Documentary linguists

Linguists who conduct prolonged fieldwork in communities to observe, record, and describe specific languages along with their structural, social, historical, and political contexts.

'Quick dash' style of recording

A method using modern digital technologies where linguists fly in, record language data briefly, fly home, and store material without long-term community immersion.