Resources
It is estimated that there are 7,000 languages spoken in the world today with 50% of the world’s population speaking 50 languages and the other 50% speaking 6,950 languages. Mandana Seyfeddinipur explains how globalization, climate change, urbanization and political unrest are causing the extinction of languages at a rate equivalent to the loss of biological diversity during the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and how this negatively impacts cultural diversity and decreases social resilience.
Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a linguist and the director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS University of London. The programme supports the documentation of endangered languages world wide. Of the approximately 7000 languages spoken today half will have fallen silent by the end of this century. Humanity is losing its linguistic diversity and these unwritten languages are vanishing without a trace. In her work she focuses on the documentation of these languages and the knowledge encoded within them. A specialist in language use and multimodality she supports and trains scholars in how to create multi-media collection of endangered languages documenting the knowledge of our human cultural heritage encoded in language.
Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America, publishes peer-reviewed articles dealing with issues in linguistic theory and a wide range of subfields of linguistics and related disciplines, as well as book reviews, notes of interest to the academic and professional linguistics community, and commentary of various kinds. The journal is published both in a print edition and on online platforms containing both the print-edition content and online-only content in such sections as Research Reports, Language and Public Policy, Perspectives, Commentaries, and Teaching Linguistics.
What did I learn from these resources?
TED Talks contains many informative videos covering various topics, such as humanities, information technology and science. By watch the videos and reading the transcripts, I learned the way to employ suitable vocabulary, or terminologies, in my writing and presentation. Since TED Talks aims at audience who are mostly laymen to the topics, the speakers are able to explain the jargon and difficult concepts in a simple and approachable manner. Therefore I enjoy learning with TED as a leisure activity, apart from browsing social media.
When I was preparing written assignments, there were many opportunities for me to read some research articles from professional journals of my studies - linguistics. As I was required to submit term paper, through reading articles written by professional researchers and scholars, I could understand the proper style and register for my writing. Particularly, scholars from linguistics and social sciences (Arts) write differently from those from mathematics and sciences (Science). For example, it would not be acceptable for a sentence to start with a 'But' in the academic essays of Arts. 'However' is always preferred. Such rule is not applicable to Science where 'But' is more than suitable as the start of a sentence. I would not have found out this interesting bite if I refused to read academic articles. Therefore I strongly recommend everyone to look for research articles that are of your interests. You will definitely learn more than just theories and investigation results.