Dr Mark Turin, anthropologist, linguist and Director for the World Oral Literature Project, has spent more than 20 years travelling to and living in Nepal, much of that time with the Thangmi community.
Thangmi is spoken by only a few thousand people. Along with half of the world’s other 6,000 natural languages, it is in danger of being lost within our lifetime.
Dr Turin’s series on BBC Radio 4 – Our Language in your Hands – begins today (Monday, December 3), and follows him to Nepal, South Africa and New York to learn about linguistic diversity and the fate of the world’s endangered languages.
Read the full story
Image:Mark Turin returning a copy of the grammar of the Thami language to one of his principal research partners and language teachers. Local intellectual Man Bahadur Thami and his daughter on the right. Cokati, Sindhupalcok, Nepal, August 2012.
Credit: Hikmat Khadka.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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The vanishing voices of Nepal, Africa – and New York
3 December 2012
A Cambridge academic devoted to the documentation of endangered languages has returned to a remote Nepali village to hand over a two-volume dictionary and grammar – the first ever written record of Thangmi – as part of a new three-part series on the world’s vanishing voices.