Language Documentation Quotes

Wikipedia's a collaborative experiment akin to Simon Winchester's account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in 'The Professor and the Madman,' which outlines James Murray's mission to produce the tome in the 19th century.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.

The Hawaiian language needs to be studied globally as a language of life.

Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.

Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.

As dialect began to be collected in the late 19th century, such words as Yorkshire's 'gobslotch' emerged, revealing the burgeoning association between gluttony and stupidity.

Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

There are very few places in the world where you have to learn a language with no language in common. It's called a monolingual field situation.

Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples.

There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

There's a tremendous amount of language loss. Most of the attention is given to indigenous languages, which makes sense, but some of the most dramatic language loss is in Europe.

Lexicographers are language reporters.

The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury.