This reminded me of a video I saw once, many years ago. It was told by the last speaker of a language - from a tribe in El Salvador, iirc (Central America, for sure). Most of his tribe had been wiped out during civil war. He and his parents were the last living speakers of their language. When his parents died, he was the last. The video was a long, tearful poem, telling the story of his people and their destruction. Of course, no one could understand a word of it but him, but the emotion was unmistakable.
On a slightly related topic, India has a vast and rich set of languages and millions of people that speak/read/write these languages. With daily newspapers, tabloids, literature etc, I presume there is a (potential) huge corpus of rich data for each language too. And, I just read yesterday that India just surpassed US to become the second biggest mobile phone market.
Then why is there not more of NLP work/products on Indian languages? There's a market for it, a huge market, isn't it?
This is the reason I am teaching my mother tongue to my kids first, where every parents in my area wants their children to speak English first and that too in American accent. I understand that it's a global language but some cultural things are really difficult to pass on to your kids without your mother tongue
One more related link to the same story, Two episode podcast about languages in India. It talks about first survey conducted during British Raj and then Ganesh Devy ji's people's linguastic survey of India:
<a href="https://soundcloud.com/theintersection/31-mission-impossible-surveying-indian-languages-and-dialects" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/theintersection/31-mission-impossible...</a>
> He discovered that some 16 languages spoken in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh have 200 words for snow alone<p>A know urban legend often applied to Inuits.<p>> Dr Devy, an untrained linguist<p>But we'll still call him doctor.<p>I'll guess he's a doctor in English? and they are there to entertain as he's done. (Obviously doctors in English can do other important things as well)<p>I don't know.... the BBC when they do these stories... intelligent people know they are not true buuuut then what does one think when they report on Syria.<p>Are stories like these symptoms and show we also should also take stories on Syria very very carefully or are they cancerous and encourage bad reporting and bad thinking? Are stories on Syria the same, just entertainment anyway and their accuracy for the masses is on equal importance?<p>I guess for me a source of truth is important and I would have though many on HN would want to seek the truth, but perhaps not so much.<p>[edit] There is also a interesting story here, I assume it's not a lie and the doctor believes what he's doing is true.... but I can't be sure from all the other inaccuracies.... but at face value he's done something really interesting that is BBC worthy. It just needs better framing.
I had a chance to visit one of academy he helped establish, adivasi academy(their domain name has expired), tejgarh, vadodra. I really liked how he played the role of catalyst in helping local people recognize their own culture and preserve it.
[Edit]: My bad for linking to the infested URL, didn't realize it.
The BBC has to get an anti-Modi (Prime Minister of India) jab in: <i>"He worries about the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP's efforts to impose Hindi all over India, which he calls a "direct attack on our linguistic plurality". "</i><p>Various governments in Delhi, throughout history, have toyed with the idea of making Hindi the national language. It hasn't happened yet, and won't happen. But, of course, the BBC would like you to believe that Modi thought of it first.
One of the main reason behind the 'developing' state of India even after 70 years of independence is its differences which Indians still have in their mind. The language barrier is the only barrier which is proving to be resistance let alone culture prevention and all that. Languages are just a form of communication between people and people should accept it. People should learn languages like English(Which have vast amount of resources available).As the growing trends suggest India will be the most populated country after 2020 and it will have around 70% of the citizens who will be youngsters. Believe it or not but sooner or later English will dominate(though i believe it's still dominating to bridge the gap between south and north india). In india you can't surf internet properly if you don't have any clue about English and india do have maximum number of smartphone users around the world and that will ofcourse help remove some sort of language barrier between people.<p>Also Modi do promote Hindi(though his mother tongue is gujarati) but I believe he does so because he finds himself more proficent orator in the language.<p>China is one more country which is preserving its culture by speaking chinese and i don't think anyone should stop someone to do so.Though it would be better if there is one unique language with which people should feel unity among themselves.