risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a “dead language". If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an "extinct language". In Indonesia, have tens of thousands of speakers but are endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are shifting to using the national language (e.g. Indonesian) in place of local languages. In contrast, a language with only 500 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the primary language of a community, and is the first (or only) spoken language of all children in that community. Methods
An endangered language documentation projects aim
to collect/create audio, video, graphic and text documentation material covering use of language in a variety of social and cultural contexts. The priorities for collecting, recording, analyzing, and archiving are: 1. to create a range of high quality materials to support description of a variety of language phenomena 2. to enable the recovery of knowledge of the language even if all other sources are lost 3. to generate resources in support of language maintenance and/or learning Why we must documenting endangered language? Documentation is the key to preserving endangered languages. Linguists are trying to document as many as they can by describing grammars and structural features, by recording spoken language and by using computers to store this information for study by scholars. Many endangered languages are only spoken; no written texts exist. So it is important to act quickly in order to capture them before they go extinct. To help preserve endangered languages, E- MELD (Electronic Met structure for Endangered Language Data) aims to boost documentation by: • duplicating and digitizing high-quality recordings in an archival form; • emphasizing self-documenting and software- independent data; • giving linguists a toolkit to analyze and compare languages; • developing a General Ontology for Linguistic Description (GOLD) to allow interoperability of archives, and comparability of data and analysis. Example Dusner The spoken tribal language in the Wandamen Bay area Cenderawasih in Papua, Indonesia, this language is critically endangered as it was reported that there are only three remaining speakers of this language, and they were reported to be injured during natural disasters. Linguists from the University of Oxford are striving to preserve the Dusner language as it was reported that two of those remaining native speakers narrowly escaped death during a flood while the other one is living near a volcano when it erupted.