Fifty experts will meet in Utah this week to begin a project to catalogue all of the world's endangered languages in an online database.

The pioneering gathering coincides with a major report by UNESCO, the UN agency dedicated to culture and education, which highlighted the threat to hundreds of the world's languages.

The University of Utah will host the Endangered Languages Information and Infrastructure workshop, which has been made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Lyle Campbell, director of the university's Center for American Indian Languages, described the loss of the world's languages as "an unspeakable tragedy," saying that linguistics "is a study of human cognition, what makes the mind tick, click, and work. When we lose, say, 50 percent of languages, we're losing 50 percent of human cognitive ability."

"The wisdom of humanity is coded in language," Campbell said. "Once a language dies, the knowledge dies with it."

Co-organizer Anthony Aristar, of Eastern Michigan University, added that "A language is not just words and grammar. It is a web of history that binds all the people who once spoke the language, all the things they did together, all the knowledge they imparted to their descendants."

Toronto University's Alana Johns said that a combination of government initiatives and grassroots action by native speakers were needed to combat the threat to languages, saying, "If something isn't done soon, some of them will disappear."

The UNESCO World Report released last week drew attention to five categories of endangered languages, ranging from "vulnerable," through to "critically endangered" and "extinct," listing over 2,500 languages overall.

Linguists predict that over half of the nearly 7,000 world languages could be extinct by the end of the century.

06 December 2009