there are seven billion people around the world and they speak about seven zero languages it's important that all the people receive health advice and other vital information in a language that they understand and  has some brilliant recommendations to share but before that let's hear about the invaluable work she has been doing the endangered languages documentation program is a funding program that supports linguists anthropologists documenters community members in their efforts to document their language we provide funding to go out live and work in and with the community and to record the ways language is used in everyday life in songs and rituals and poetry in oral literature and so on and the recordings that are being made are then brought back into the endangered languages archive the which is a digital archive that makes these recordings available to the community to scholars to the public free of charge so it's openly accessible it is um free of charge um so this is those are the the key components of what we do and this program of the endangered languages and the endangered language documentation in the archive is basically was a response twenty years ago to the decline in linguistic diversity because of globalization climate change and urbanization linguists biologists people all over the world recognize that in the changes through modernization industrialization and the digital development are so massive and are so fast that they're having a massive impact on the lives of people and one way of them having an impact is people leaving their traditional ways of life behind and moving to cities um which are holding the promise of a better life so they make they move to cities in order to  enable economic and social mobility for themselves and a better life for their children and when they do that they want to make sure that the children have the best access to education and to resources for a better life and this comes at the cost of the language that they're speaking their traditional language their heritage language which are not being which is not being taught to the children anymore now the majority of the world's languages are oral languages they're not written and the only way these languages live on is by transmission namely from one generation to the other and the moment that transmissional chain is broken meaning that the language is not passed on from the parents to the children these languages will disappear because the children don't learn them anymore they don't learn the knowledge that is encoded in these languages and because these are oral languages they don't have a written script there's no books there's written in those languages there's no libraries this is all in heads of its speakers once there are no speakers this knowledge disappears if we're lucky there was a linguist or a missionary or a traveler or an anthropologist at some point who recorded a couple of words who wrote a word list or wrote a grammar that you know is sitting in some archive that is sitting in some library not accessible to the speakers themselves because it's written in the language that they don't understand or it's you know behind a paywall it's a commercial publisher so they cannot even afford to buy the book if they even know that it exists so what is happening is that we're losing the linguistic diversity of humanity at a dramatic speed and the response to this was from the linguist side to document as much as we can as fast as we can to preserve it for posterity to support communities in their efforts to maintain and preserve their languages and to create a digital repository that will you know tell the world about the diversity that we had today um with seven zero living languages this century so our linguists our community members they go and do these recordings and they bring this back into our digital archive so this archive is a digital archive it holds recordings in over five hundred languages and all these languages are highly endangered they will very likely be falling silence within the next one hundred years fifty years ten years some of these collections are this recordings of loudspeakers that are you know um quite old and we have recordings of speakers that died during project so it's the last recording of some someone and we feel it's a very important thing that the digital advent has allowed us to to equip linguists or field workers to go and to record as much as possible in the way language is used and not as abstract d as it is written in grammars which is also an important thing to have a grammar but the idea behind this is what you know the main author of the seminal paper nicolas  called a multi purpose record a record of a language that is there for the historian the speaker the grandchildren of the speakers the oral his the person who's interested in rituals  religious contexts the ethnic music colleges but also the public the people want to know how do people live in these place how you did they used to speak and each language is testimony to the creativity of the human mind right there are seven zero varieties that human humanity has created and each of them has been developed over centuries accumulating the knowledge the world view the cosmology of a community in a particular place at a particular time and it's that what we want to at least capture a snapshot before it is too late before this goes without a trace or is only in a in a library i think it is really important that um there has to be you know grassroots efforts to support community members and people activists that  start documentation themselves and that can do a lot of things themselves and there are efforts all over the world where you can see activists doing exactly that where they're recording themselves and putting these recordings or they create facebook pages where they start chatting and sending messages back and forth in their languages or they start writing their stories down and you know publish little dictionaries and whatnot so there's efforts all over the place where you don't need to have you know the most fancy video camera to get started on it it starts out with a pen and a paper and it goes on with a phone and it goes on in into building capacity within the community to even get the community behind it to start doing this and for example in south america we know about the effort where communities seek out linguists that can build the bridge into getting funding right that have the ability to speak to a funding body in the language that the funding body needs to be able to create the resources that the community then can have to step up their game and to create a digital archive or something that is sustainable for them but it is there is community radio that is happening where you know the they're airing you know shows in their languages talks in their languages news in their languages and then the radio station you know archives these materials and with the advent of the digital it is possible because you know a small sd card can hold a lot of audio recordings so there's a lot of activity going on on the ground in different areas where community members were speakers where activists get incredibly creative in in you know trying to document and trying to be active in maintaining and preserving their their languages and the knowledge that is expressed in the language i must mention here that the united nations educational scientific and cultural organization has been working towards protecting languages for years now two thousand and nineteen was declared as the international year of indigenous languages to encourage indigenous language communities and to help promote indigenous languages you can check it's an important activity to showcase the issues around indigenous languages and language endangerment and basically marginalization of speakers of communities and their exclusion of access to events to have recordings to you know to really bring to the public mind what is happening all over the world in terms of languages and in terms of you know the shift that is happening with less and less children learning the language of their heritage and of their families but giving them up for majority languages of the society surrounding them so unesco created a registry so you can register your events and just looking at all the global events are happening all over the place it is very impressive and i think there is some push that might be of interest to think about having a decade of indigenous languages because what centers around languages is not about language it's about the lives of people and in that respect it is actually key for the un and unesco to take action because of the effects of globalization urban climate change on the effects on the life of marginalized people all over the world so i want to ask dr safidani for about a scenario where speakers of an indigenous language do not have a linguist working for the protection of their language and they need to document the language on their own oh that's a difficult one right because the interest the questions the linguist is asking and the things that the linguist needs to know to be able to do their work is different from what um often the community is interested in right so the community often we see you know they were interested in recording their traditions recording their songs recording their oral traditions recording their rituals and of course there that's all a very specific kind of language and the linguist who wants to understand the structure needs to have one in the same sentence spoken in different ways needs you know you know have you know sometimes the word at the beginning of the sentence and sometimes at the end and so that is incredibly boring for a community member or for a community because the structural aspects are not the key part so i think that's so that brings that makes two things very different sometimes to bring together however i think it's about it's about bringing the two perspectives together and given the situation it is key in for first and foremost is that the community records what is relevant to them and what they see but i want to put out the questions when i say the community is who do we mean because a community is not a coherent body right there is some hierarchical structure there's people that decide this is important and this is not important and first we do this and second we do that um and of course for me as a linguist i want it both right i want to see the recordings that you know are relevant and most important for the community and that will be also very important for the linguist because ritual language is incredibly interesting because it has some formulaic things in but it's not the language how people speak it and if the linguist wants to understand what the structure of a language is he needs to first understand how they speak it before he can then see what the ritual version of the language and so as a linguist you know i would always ask can you just record how you chat can you record how you you know prepare food can you record how you build boats just talk about it and tell me you know how do you do this and already that is going to create a really rich body because that would also document for example how you create your material culture and around that you will have all the stories if i ask you how to how you do how do you harvest honey how do you make honey then i will know everything about bees and when i know about honey and bees i might know something about you know the songs the bee sings in the love story of what not because these are all interwoven things  so one gets to the other and the far most end on the linguistic side might not be the interest of the community in the first place but whatever the community will do will be of use for a linguist no matter what so that's why this has to rule first many of you might have heard about the universal declaration of human rights a one thousand nine hundred and forty eight historic document that was adopted at the united nations general assembly and this was right after the world war ii the thirty article document is vital to framing the individual rights of these article two identifies access to information in one's own language as a fundamental right so i was curious to learn about the use of indigenous languages for providing access to information well it's you know i mean first and foremost we should not forget that most in many world people are multilingual right they not only know one language they know two three four and they speak two three four languages on a daily basis if we are in a situation where the government information you know to the resources that are available to people in terms of education health access to resources is in a particular language that they cannot access then that means that it's a measure of exclusion meaning they cannot participate access to knowledge and access to is access to resources so if you don't know about something and if you cannot find out then you cannot use this and as a citizen you have a government that will provide this for its society the linguistic barrier that is introduced by not making it available in different ways in heterogeneous ways to respond to the of a society means that particular parts of society will be excluded from accessing that knowledge the moment they're excluded we're dealing with a case of inequity and the cannot understand if you have no access about information about elections you cannot elect if you cannot elect your voice is not represented if your voice is not represented then you're not partaking in decision making in your own country and also in the resources that are made available to you and your family and your children so the linguistic barrier is a massive political instrument or a massive political issue that we need to address and we need to address the issue around the idea that that it's all about translation right um if you're working if you are in a situation where you have a lot of o languages which are not written how do you do the translation right i mean if you have non literate people that need to access that information you need to make this material available the information available in  visual ways whatever that might mean in your context because that's a part of being equitable and in caring for the society in its breath as it is it's the same situation if you have a sign language and a sign language community the material has to be made available in that language so that they can understand and access that knowledge to be able to take advantage of it we live in a time where our privacy is always under risk i asked dr sefer daniper if the use of indigenous languages also plays a role in understanding about privacy among the native speakers i'm not sure that this is a language issue i think that's uh that's an issue that pertains to all of us and that has to do with the fact that through the digital and through the massive and fast changes in the world about how information is processed how information can be linked is to understand what privacy and protection of private knowledge of private information means i think we're all still in the boat where we're actually quite shocked to understand what can be done with information about us and if you look at the generational shifts and you look at the kids that put the most problematic information up on the web for free not understanding what kind of repercussions that had and can have you know at a later point in their life and how this can be abused misused in different ways that is i think something that is incredibly shocking and scary and it's something that we grapple with all together eve also in the first in in the world where we think we have an understanding of what governments do and don't do and how information can be used and not used be used and of course that pertains to people that you know um provide information to governments about their lives but that pertains also to me to not really understand when i input all my information by getting on an airline uh that that then is shared with authorities whether or not  you know entering a particular country or not so i think the privacy issue in the digital age and sharing information with governments where with any kind of institutional  body is highly highly problematic at the moment and i think we as a lot of people where we all are suspicious and no know what's actually happening and how this information is being used and we're grappling with it privacy i mean it's the same kind of question if you ask someone for consent to record something and they put it on the internet if this is someone who's not using the internet and has never seen it and doesn't really know what that means if they say  does it mean they understand to what they just said yes no they haven't right the fact that you know your daughter is recording you telling a story and that she's gonna put that on her facebook site meaning that you're being seen in the world telling a story you might have no idea what that means when you said oh yeah sure you can do this little girl so if you don't have access to knowledge you don't know what is happening on this world you can't access you can't control it you can't see it because you're not partaking in the discourse then that is also i mean then that excludes you but even what i'm saying is even if you're included you don't know what is happening right even if you can't access this knowledge and of course it's accelerated if you are in a community where you don't know at all what is actually happening with that uh kind of information that you're  was when government bodies or other key stakeholders of a region must ensure that indigenous and other native languages are used so that people are well aware of any kind of critical i think that is one of the most most important impression pressuring points is like you know you can just take it as very simple things emergency responses right emergency responses of governments uh emergencies responses in case of epidemics so one of the main issues that you have whatever with the ebola crisis or with kind of epidemics is to get information as fast as possible to places where you cannot send out a pamphlet and a flyer written in the majority language because these they might not read and even they not they don't read that language and they don't know the language and you need to have the information that needs to be spread as fast as possible and for that that is one of the areas exactly what is important to make sure that information is being made available but to do that you need to know what language it is and where that language is spoken and where these people sit to be able to get that information out there now as i said before we cannot expect that all governments will be able to make everything available in seven zero languages right so there has to be a reality check and the reality check is that these are all multilinguals these are all people that speak multiple languages but you need to understand which ones they are and which ones is the most effective way of spreading and making information accessible there's also a problematic assumption that often comes into that is that in a lot of places in the world it multilingualism is the norm right namely the fact that people speak a particular language in school a particular language in the religion a particular language with their mothers another language with their fathers and people are multilingual but it's not the case that they're these are communities of practices they're very good in talking about x in this language and why about that language right so you have repertoires that at your disposal that you are juggling around and using it as you need it as you go along it's not the case that you know every single language in its full and can do everything with every single language right so and ten by ten kilometers ten twelve zero people nine languages on a daily basis so that questions this whole notion about you know one language one people one whatever so we need to kind of think in a way more dynamic way about what language use and the linguistic reality and the linguistic ecologies of communities is to be able to understand how we can make sure that they get access to the information they need because access to information is in our day and age one of the most valuable things that we have recently d institution the soas world languages institute in london and two other academic institutions both at the university of buffalo in the us have created a project called virallanguages  g speakers of any marginalized languages including indigenous minority and endangered languages can use the scripts that are available on this website along with several other resources and the languages and create informational videos about kovite nineteen you heard earlier how most languages in the world are oral the speakers of many of them don't have access to information in their own language if you yourself are speaker of any of the marginalized languages or in know someone who is please do check out this website you can also go to the get involved tab on the website to contact thank you for listening to this conversation with festival organizers we recorded this conversation at rsa in london and more details about the attribution for the cc licensed music used here are listed in the description