To Wake the Dead

Tag: Endangered Languages

  • Linguistics for All, 2: Rare Features of Select Endangered Languages

    Linguistics for All, 2: Rare Features of Select Endangered Languages

    Though this is technically Linguistics for All, 2, this post is about NYU League of Linguistics’ first discussion group of the semester—I’m posting it now because a few people asked for the recap, and I’m more than happy to oblige.

    The conversation focused on typological features found in endangered languages—many of them rare in the languages of the world and very unexpected (to English speakers, that is). We took a fast but focused world tour: Austronesian syntax, Mayan phonology, Bantu morphology, and more. The goal wasn’t comprehensiveness, but curiosity. What kinds of things can human languages do? And what’s at stake when we lose examples of those things?

    Some of the questions that came up:

    • How do syntactic constraints shift when the verb comes first? When the object comes before the subject?
    • Why might a language have a vast and highly irregular consonant inventory? Why might sound changes that are quite unique cross-linguistically emerge?
    • What’s it like to speak a language where every noun has to fit into one of twenty classes, each with its own agreement pattern?

    The point was to slow down and marvel at the extent of linguistic diversity, and just what we’d lose if those languages went extinct. These features are beautiful, in my opinion, but they’re also systemically instructive. They tell us what’s possible in the “design space” of language, and how they resist the tidy models that formalists sometimes prefer.

    For those who couldn’t attend, the slides are linked here along with a short primer on the pre-event readings & videos, plus a folder of journal articles and book chapters in a shared Google Drive. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record the session, but I’m hoping to incorporate some of this material into future blog entries or curriculum tools.

    And if this is your first time hearing about the League, drop me a line at tfavdw@nyu.edu—we meet semi-regularly and welcome anyone curious about language in any form. NYU affiliates and non-NYU people can both attend.

    Stay tuned for our next session: a hands-on cryptography and forensic linguistic game using real linguistic data, running during midterms as a low-stakes puzzle night (with some surprise mechanics). It’ll be at 10 Washington Place, NY, NY, at 6:30pm on April 1st. More details are available at nyulol.org, and a recording of the presentation portion, delivered by a leading forensic linguist, will be posted shortly after the event.

  • Linguistics for All, 1: A World Tour of Endangerment and Hope

    Map of endangered language prevalence worldwide.

    Over the past two months, I had the chance to lead two discussion groups for the NYU League of Linguistics. The first concerned endangered language typology, highlighting interesting features from languages across the world: Austronesian verb-initial sentences, unique Mayan phonologies, and rich Bantu noun classes & declensions.

    The second focused on revitalization efforts (video here) around the world, focusing on Hawaiian, Welsh, and Hebrew. We explored how languages can be revived when intergenerational transmission is fading, and what gets negotiated along the way. Key questions were: What counts as success in revitalization? What has become of our own ancestral languages, and why? What trade-offs—like the loss of minority dialects—do we accept? And crucially: where do we, as linguists, fit in?

    Together, these sessions became an profound study in contrast: one examining how endangered languages structure and make sense of the world, the other how we might help them endure in it.

    As someone who works primarily with dead languages, this topic holds a particular fascination for me. I live among the dead—scripts etched into stone, grammars fossilized in treatises, phonologies inferred but never heard. Endangered languages, by contrast, are not yet dead. Revitalization efforts aim to preserve what I usually only encounter after the fact: living, breathing language. That shift in focus—from excavation to preservation—has reshaped how I think about what linguistic work can be.

    It also deepens our understanding of language change. Revitalization doesn’t freeze a language in time—it lets us see what happens next. Take Hawaiian, whose famously tiny consonant inventory (only eight!) allows a wide range of free variation. Will it continue to shrink? Will contrasts harden? Watching a language evolve under new sociopolitical pressures offers historical linguists like me something rare: the chance to witness change not as reconstruction, but as unfolding reality.

    One thing that became clear between the two sessions was the importance of community and agency. Typological structures are fascinating—but they exist amid complicated social structures. We came away with a deeper appreciation for linguistic diversity as a lived reality. Our role, ultimately, is not to fix or play savior—but to listen, support, and amplify the work already being done.