National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Monday, November 23, 2009

Photo: What Happens When a Language Dies?


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Linguist Gregory Anderson (right), a member of the Enduring Voices Project—a joint initiative of the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon—works with Ganesh Murmu (middle), a linguist at Ranchi University in India's Jharkhand State, to interview a woman (name withheld) from the Aka tribal group in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.

The visit yielded the first-known recordings of several rare languages.

Photograph by Chris Rainier