On Friday this week (9th December, 4-7pm) the Endangered Languages Project at SOAS is participating in the national ESRC Festival of Social Science going on throughout the UK and aimed at highlighting for the general public the work that is being done in the Social Sciences.
Our event is called Every Language Matters and will “promote a public understanding of the place that languages hold in the lives of individuals and communities around the world, as well as the role of linguistic research in furthering our understanding of language”. We will be showcasing some of the work our staff and students are doing, as well as having hands-on sessions where members of the public can engage with issues in language diversity and language and cultural documentation and preservation.
If you are in London this coming Friday do come by SOAS and have a look at Vanuatu sand drawings, fieldwork in the Kimberleys, mapping the world’s language landscape, and how we are documenting and archiving language diversity.
Post-script: One of the activities we will showcase is Language Landscape, a student-led project to map audio, video or photographic samples of language use around the world. They have just been awarded one of the eight 2012 Google Earth Outreach Developer Grants that were recently announced. The team is very active and you can follow them on Twitter.
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