Disappearing Languages

A joint Brazilian and German project plans to document native Brazilian languages threatened with extinction, reports Brazil’s newspaper de S. Paulo. Researchers hope to preserve the Trumai, Aweti, and Cuicuro tongues by creating a digital data bank of texts and sounds. According to a linguist  only 180 of Brazil’s original 1,200 native tongues have survived. Of these, at least 50 are spoken by fewer than 100 people. In the case of one language, Makú, the only speaker is a 70-year-old widower living in the north of Brazil.The linguist says that the preservation of native languages is vital to conserving the traditional knowledge of a people.