Language Log

"How the World's Largest Language Family Spread – and Why Others Go Extinct." Robinson, Andrew. Nature 641, no. 8061 (April 28, 2025): 31-33.

This is a review of the following three books:

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
Laura Spinney (William Collins 2025)

The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting their Story
J. P. Mallory (Thames & Hudson 2025)

Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of HiddenLanguages
Lorna Gibb (Atlantic 2025)

AntC reports:

Earlier this month, I travelled the length of Taiwan's East Coast by train. Every station is decked out with Indigenous art, with the location's name given in both Mandarin and the applicable Indigenous language (Roman script).

Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, an associate professor of linguistics at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, called my attention to this article he wrote for The Conversation (1/26/25), "Finding ‘Kape’: How Language Documentation helps us preserve an endangered language". He and his research team are currently doing intensive fieldwork on the languages of the remote Indonesian island of Alor, which lies northeast of Timor-Leste.  Their purpose is to document and preserve endangered languages.  Among the endangered languages they have discovered and first documented is Kape, which I will discuss in more detail below.

One Man’s Mission to Revive an Indigenous Language in Argentina

This Language Was Long Believed Extinct. Then One Man Spoke Up. 

Blas Jaime has spent nearly two decades resurrecting Chaná, an Indigenous language in Argentina that he learned from his mother. Blas Omar Jaime has, in many ways, placed the Chaná Indigenous group back on the map.

NYT (1/13/24), by Natalie Alcoba; Photographs and Video by Sebastián López Brach

To revive a half-dead language is not an easy task.

As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. Over yerba mate and torta fritas, his mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored in Chaná, a throaty language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue.

[This is a guest post by AntC]

This T-shirt I had to buy *immediately*:

There are many things about Papua New Guinea (PNG) that make it unique (the abundance of its flora and fauna, its ritualistic cannibalism, its political complexity, etc.), but above all for me is the huge number of its languages, especially considering its relatively small population on such a large amount of land (see below for some details).

Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; /ˈpæp(j)uə … ˈɡɪni, ˈpɑː-/ ^ⓘ, also US: /ˈpɑːpwə-, ˈpɑːp(j)ə-/^[12]) is a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia (a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia). Officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea (Tok Pisin: Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; Hiri Motu: Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), it shares its only land border with Indonesia to the west and it is directly adjacent to Australia to the south and the Solomon Islands to the east. Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third largest island country, with an area of 462,840 km² (178,700 sq mi).

It was bound to happen:

New street signs with Massachusett language translation will be installed in East Cambridge

More than 70 new signs will designate First through Eighth Streets after a participatory budget item.

Molly Farrar, Boston.com (12/6/23)

The Boston.com article doesn't say much about Massachusett, but at the least we should note that it is an Algonquian language and that it had a surprisingly high degree of literacy.

The Massachusett language is an Algonquian language of the Algic language family that was formerly spoken by several peoples of eastern coastal and southeastern Massachusetts. In its revived form, it is spoken in four communities of Wampanoag people. The language is also known as Natick or Wôpanâak (Wampanoag), and historically as Pokanoket, Indian or Nonantum.

How many are there?

Taiwan’s unrecognized indigenous tribes are reviving dead languages to achieve recognition

There are currently 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples in Taiwan. The Pingpu — which comprise 10 groups on the island’s lowlands — are lobbying to make that number 17, and they’re doing it by reviving lost languages and culture.

By Jordyn Haime, The China Project (6/5/23)

In contemporary Mandarin, many of the speakers of these languages are called shāndì tóngbāo 山地同胞 ("mountain countrymen / compatriots"), which meshes well with the opening paragraph of Haime's article:

Long before Chinese settlers came to the flat, sprawling lands of the Pingtung plain — the southern Taiwanese county now known for its pineapple and mango production — the area was inhabited by Pingpu (plains indigenous) tribes like the Makatao. Waves of colonization pushed indigenous tribes from their ancestral lands and closer to the mountains, or in some cases, to the other side of the island.

I've always pronounced it as rhyming with "thanks", but Wiktionary makes it sound more like "monks" in German, Dutch, and UK English.

"Manx" is the English exonym for the language whose endonym "is Gaelg/Gailck, which shares the same etymology as the word 'Gaelic', as do the endonyms of its sister languages Irish (Gaeilge; Gaoluinn, Gaedhlag and Gaeilic) and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig)." (source)

Manx (or Manx Gaelic) was declared extinct as a first language in 1974 with the death of Ned Maddrell, but then achieved the remarkable feat of revival.  Since the topic of language extinction / survival / revival came up recently (see "Selected readings" below), I was especially drawn to this newspaper report:

An Ancient Language, Once on the Brink, Is a British Isle’s Talk of the Town

After being nearly silenced, Manx is experiencing a revival on the Isle of Man, thanks in part to an elementary school and some impassioned parents.

By Megan Specia, NYT (Nov. 24, 2022)

Article by Keoni Everington in Taiwan News (11/19/22):

"90% of Taiwanese say learning Mandarin beneficial to job, relationships"

'Mandarin education should not be a victim of politics,' say National Taiwan Normal University professors

Worth pondering:

‘The more languages we have, the better we can understand the world’

The vanishing Aleut language and the future of Russia’s linguistic diversity

3:50 am, October 25, 2022
Source: Meduza

Interview by Anna Smirnova. English-language version by Sam Breazeale.

Is it possible for a recently dead language like Manchu, which was politically powerful for centuries and had millions of speakers, to be brought back to life?  I think definitely yes, if there's a will to revive it, especially if it has close living relative with tens of thousands of speakers, such as Sibe / Xibe, there's no reason why it cannot be done

In early October, an 86-year-old man named Gennady Yakovlev died in the village of Nikolskoye on Russia’s Bering Island. Subsequent news reports referred to him as the last native speaker of the Aleut language — and many proclaimed that the language had died along with him. Meduza spoke to Evgeny Golovko, the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Linguistic Studies, about the history of the Aleut language, why languages disappear, and whether the Aleut language really died along with Yakovlev.

[This is a guest post by Greg Pringle, in response to questions I posed regarding the photograph at the top of this post from yesterday, mainly: 


What does the Mongolian script say?  Does it match the Chinese*?  Are there any mistakes in it?

*The Chinese is short for "in color with Doppler ultrasound".]

The Mongolian says önggöt – het dolgion – zurag (ᠥᠩᠭᠡᠲᠦ ᠬᠡᠲᠦ ᠳᠣᠯᠭᠢᠶᠠᠨ ᠵᠢᠷᠤᠭ). It literally means "coloured ultra-wave picture" or, as Google Translate has it, "colour ultrasound imaging”. My Inner Mongolian dictionaries confirm that önggöt het dolgion zurag means literally “彩色超声波图” in Chinese and it is found on the Internet with that meaning.

You quote Diana Shuheng Zhang as saying the Chinese means "Color Doppler Ultrasound". I did find önggöt doppler zuraglal (Өнгөт Допплер зураглал) "coloured Doppler sketch” in Mongolian-language pages on the Russian Internet, and Jichang Lulu found a couple of sources from Mongolia.

Rather than continue confirming what you already know, I think it fair to bring up the issue of terminology.