Program offers chance to save endangered languages By Melanie La Vache Like to speak Irantxe, Marringarr or Taulil? Ever heard anyone talking in Nganasan? They are some of the languages in danger of joining the 30 around the world that become extinct every year. However, an ANU professor is offering the chance to help "save" a language from extinction. Language is the most precious human resource, a window on the culture of people - not simply a means of communicating, said Linguistics Professor Bob Dixon. He estimated that documenting one language could be accomplished in three years, allowing time to "train the natives as linguists in order to perpetuate their language". For $US200,000, a team of trained linguists will research a selected language by travelling to the country of origin to interview the remaining speakers. They will document words, sentence structure, syntax, grammar and inflection, finally creating a dictionary and other volumes of text describing the language. As speakers of obscure languages assimilate into the mainstream of civilisation, they naturally switch to the major language, and as these speakers die, their native language dies with them. It is estimated that of the 5,000 languages spoken in the world today, at least three-quarters will have ceased to be spoken by 2100. Prof Dixon insists "it is an urgent task to document these languages before they disappear" but no sponsors have been found yet. Since it is logistically impossible to document all endangered languages, a set of priorities has been established. The Research Centre for Linguistic Typology has assessed which endangered languages should receive the highest priority for documentation and will offer them to interested sponsors. Prof Dixon says that undertaking two or three language documentations initially would be ideal for his centre and staff. The centre is also organising international workshops on topics in typological theory. The first, this week (August 18­23), is on "Valency-changing derivations" - looking at passives, antipassives, causatives and applicatives in cross-linguistic perspective. "By examining little-known languages, we may evolve some new mode of thinking that could help to deal with problems in the modern world," says Prof Dixon. "Some of the people who live in the most primitive material ways often have the most complex language structures."