I am very glad that I asked for an alternative assignment for being out of town during the EC event because the keynote address from an ACTFL event in 2012 was fantastic and one of the most informative speeches I have seen, including TED Talks. Professor David Harrison of Swarthmore University is giving a speech to language teachers. He estimates that half of all languages will be lost in the next century, approximately 1 language lost per 2 weeks. His speech focuses on language diversity and why it matters. I would like to talk about each of the languages he discusses and the lessons he learned from them, but this paper would end up being way to long. So, I will cover some of the other areas of interest I had in his lecture.

Out of 7,000 languages there are 83 major languages that account for 80 percent of language speakers. That is such a small number to me and was shocking because I believed that there were more languages than 83 due to the amount of countries in the world and multiple languages per company. Professor Harrison speaks with people whose languages are about to be lost and why those people feel that this is such an urgent issue. He points out that generational changes in speakers can lead to language extinction and brings this up in many of his examples.

I’m sure that it was hard for Professor Harrison to narrow down the list of the 40 percent of languages in danger of extinction and I feel that he picked great examples that show the depth of this issue. I was very interested to learn about ethnopharmicalogical knowledge and ethnobiological knowledge. I had never heard of them before and was very excited to see that biology has such a place in language, especially in languages that risk going extinct such as Tuvan. Tuvan is a language that comes from a nomadic group that lives in Siberia. This is my next area of personal interest.

Tuvan is particularly interesting to me because of the ability for speakers to create new words and those new words will be completely understood by another Tuvan speaker. I also really enjoyed the Tuvan throat singing video Professor Harrison showed and I am sure my wife will never let me live that down as she loves to poke fun at my hippie nature. The Tuvan language has 5 words for “go” and all require you to know the closet river and direction the river current flow. I enjoyed the lessons about this language and in particular that “Language is more than we think”.
