Ainu language

• But this great diversity is threatened as more and more languages aren’t taught to children and fall into slumber.
• Our findings are alarming: we’re losing languages, we’re losing language diversity, and unless we do something, these windows into our collective history will close.

What is grammar?

• To combine “Sarah”, “write” and “paper” into a well-formed sentence, I have to indicate a time.
• If you don’t have tense in an English sentence, then it’s not grammatical.
• As the great anthropologist Franz Boas once said:
  grammar […] determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed.
• Read more:
  Meet the remote Indigenous community where a few thousand people use 15 different languages

A huge linguistic database of grammar

• Our team of international colleagues built it over several years by reading many books about language rules, and speaking to experts and community members about specific languages.
• Grammars of different languages can be very different from each other.
• In Grambank, we used 195 questions to compare more than 2,400 languages – including two signed languages.
• Each dot represents a language, and the more similar the colour, the more similar the languages.

Almost half the world’s linguistic diversity is threatened

• In addition to the loss of individual languages, our team wanted to understand what we stand to lose in terms of grammatical diversity.
• Frighteningly, some regions of the world such as South America and Australia are expected to lose all of their indigenous linguistic diversity, because all of the indigenous languages there are threatened.

What’s next?

• Around the world, grassroots organisations including the Ngukurr Language Centre, Noongar Boodjar Language Centre, and the Canadian Heiltsuk Cultural Education Centre are working towards language maintenance and revitalisation.
• To get a feel for what this can be like, check out this interactive animation by Angelina Joshua.