What is being lost, and what it contains.
8 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Unua Libro
L. L. Zamenhof · 1887
Proposes a deliberately regular grammar and a vocabulary built from recognisable European roots, arguing an invented auxiliary language can lower the…
+4 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
An International Language
Otto Jespersen · 1928
Argues that an effective international auxiliary language must be built from principles of maximal regularity and ease of production rather than from…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Introduction to Handbook of American Indian Languages
Franz Boas · 1911
Argues Native American languages must be described using categories drawn from their own grammatical structure rather than forced into Latin-based…
+1 more at this level
12 works
L. L. Zamenhof
Proposes a deliberately regular grammar and a vocabulary built from recognisable European roots, arguing an invented auxiliary language can lower the cost of international communication if, unlike earlier schemes, it is actually put into use.
link checked 17 Sept 2026UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages
Sets out nine factors, from intergenerational transmission to community attitudes, for judging how endangered a language is, giving revitalisation programmes a shared framework instead of an impressionistic judgement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026UNESCO
Documents the world's languages by vulnerability level and argues linguistic diversity is collapsing at a rate comparable to biodiversity loss, with roughly half of today's languages projected to disappear within a century.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gary F. Simons & M. Paul Lewis
Uses Ethnologue's Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale to update Michael Krauss's 1992 estimate of global language endangerment, finding that over 75% of the languages spoken in 1950 in Australia, Canada and the United States are now extinct or moribund while sub-Saharan Africa has lost under 10%, and traces the gap to settlement versus exploitation colonization.
The Saguaro Group (ed.)
Teaches phonological analysis hands-on through examples drawn from Indigenous languages of North and South America, aiming the material at community members doing language revitalization work rather than at theoretical linguists, and building each chapter around applying the analysis to a learner's own language.
Otto Jespersen
Argues that an effective international auxiliary language must be built from principles of maximal regularity and ease of production rather than from any one national language, and sets out Novial as an attempt to apply those principles.
Kenneth Hale et al.
Argues the accelerating loss of the world's languages is a crisis comparable to the loss of a biological species, because each language embodies a unique, non-recoverable intellectual and cultural achievement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Anthony C. Woodbury
Argues documentary linguistics should aim to record the full range of a community's communicative practices, not just elicited grammar and wordlists, because a record built only for grammatical description leaves most of what a language does undocumented.
David Harmon & Jonathan Loh
Builds a quantitative index tracking the number and geographic distribution of the world's languages over time, showing a measurable decline in global linguistic diversity comparable to indices used for biodiversity loss.
Gabriela Pérez Báez, Rachel Vogel & Uia Patolo
Reports a mixed-methods survey of 245 language revitalization efforts worldwide and finds that programs concentrate heavily on classroom language teaching relative to intergenerational transmission at home, with sustained funding and institutional endorsement standing out as the strongest predictors of a program's survival.
Franz Boas
Argues Native American languages must be described using categories drawn from their own grammatical structure rather than forced into Latin-based parts of speech, founding the descriptive method that American linguistics still uses.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nikolaus P. Himmelmann
Argues documenting a language, building a lasting record of primary data, is a distinct task from describing its grammar, and that documentation should not be treated as a mere by-product of description.
link checked 17 Sept 2026