Well, Endangered Languages Week 2008<\/a> has drawn to a close, and apart from feeling knackered after a week of full-on EL activities, we at SOAS reckon it all went pretty well. We had a lot of fun, especially during the kick-off debate about What is your language footprint?<\/a> when the “for team” of David Nathan, Chaithra Puttaswamy and Juliette Rutherford were soundly defeated by the “against team” of Peter Austin, Julia Sallabank and Peter Sutton. Superior debating skills combined with some bad jokes won the day. Another highlight of the week was the UK Premiere of the film “The Linguists” which was attended by over 90 people, many of whom got to meet in person K. David Harrison<\/a>, one of the dynamic duo who star in the film. <\/p>\n
\nOur main goal for EL Week 2008 was showing what we are doing in EL research, teaching, and archiving at the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project<\/a> and communicating with as wide an audience as possible. We feel we achieved that, both in the real and virtual interactions we had with visitors, most of whom have never come to Project activities before. Some students even travelled from Paris to attend the workshops and films. We also made contact with the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies<\/a> which is a publicly funded service, providing UK-wide support and services for higher education in these three areas. They featured EL Week 2008 on their website and mailed out a special e-bulletin about our activities to their 3,000 subscribers \u2013 as a consequence, a number of teachers came to SOAS during the week, and we now have great opportunities for future collaboration.
\nSo, here are some statistics about the week (all numbers are approximate):<\/p>\n