Excerpt
SUMMARY: “Language Matters,” (link to full video) a new PBS documentary, explores how linguistic heritage and traditional cultures around the world are at risk of being lost forever. Jeffrey Brown talks to the show’s host, poet Bob Holman, about the fight to revive languages on the brink.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And finally tonight: to languages around the world at risk of being lost.
That’s the subject of a new documentary premiering on some PBS stations this week and now streaming online.
Jeffrey Brown has our look.
NARRATOR: You are listening to a song sung in a language called Amurdak, a language spoken in northern Australia. There is virtually only one person left on our planet who speaks Amurdak.
His name is Charlie Mangulda.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): A language nearly gone from an aboriginal community on Australia’s Goulburn Islands.
The new PBS documentary “Language Matters” explore tongues around the globe at risk of being lost forever and what is lost with them.
GWYNETH LEWIS, National Poet of Wales: We are being narrowed and homogenized by the loss of languages that we’re not even aware of.
JEFFREY BROWN: Predictions are dire that, by the end of this century, more than half of the world’s 6,000 languages will be gone.
BOB HOLMAN, Host, “Language Matters”: Every language has poetry, although it’s very different from culture to culture. And as I began to learn about how these languages are disappearing, that kind of poetry is also going. The entire inner life of a people is disappearing when their language vanishes.
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