About Us
There are many reasons why linguists predict that half of the world’s 6,000 languages will disappear within decades. Languages may disappear for political reasons where governments impose dominant languages on a geographical region. It may also be the case that the usage of these languages is a trademark of a less desirable social status. Or the speakers of a language may have simply been wiped out due to genocide, natural disasters, or mass migration.
For these reasons, it takes a collective interdisciplinary effort to successfully document, preserve, protect, and promote the world’s languages from extinction. Linguists will work to document and analyze these languages. Political scientists can explore the role of governmental policies in language death. Sociologists and anthropologists can surely contribute their insights on the social reasons of language death. Finally, the arts, music, and literature of these languages should also be of interest for scholars in the humanities. The bottom line is that the CUNY Language Documentation and Advocacy Group has the potential to attract a diversity of academic disciplines. At the same time, it is also fundamentally distinct from the other chartered organizations at the Graduate Center where it seeks to spotlight unfamiliar languages in an environment that is already diverse.
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