{"id":3709,"date":"2008-07-16T20:58:18","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T20:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2008\/07\/top-of-the-pops\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:49:19","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:49:19","slug":"top-of-the-pops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2008\/07\/top-of-the-pops\/","title":{"rendered":"Top of the Pops"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Books section<\/a> of the website of The Guardian<\/i> newspaper here in the UK has a feature they call Top 10s<\/a>. These are lists prepared by a prominent author featuring their pick of the top 10 items within a topic area, one usually connected to the publication of one of their books. There are the kinds of lists you might expect, like Sarah Anderson’s Top 10 books about wilderness<\/a>, or Alison MacLeod’s top 10 short stories<\/a>. But there are also cute ones like Simon Critchley’s top 10 philosophers’ deaths<\/a> (would linguists’ deaths be quite so interesting?).
\nIn connection with the recent publication<\/a> of the book I edited called 1000 Languages<\/a>, The Guardian<\/em> asked me to prepare a Top 10 endangered languages<\/i> list. “Great”, I thought, “given my interest in communicating about our work<\/a>, here’s a way to reach thousands of Guardian <\/em>readers and others and get them interested in what we do as linguists, as well as highlight some issues about endangered languages. But how do you pick 10 languages<\/b> out of a potential list of 3,000 (or over 6,000 if Michael Krauss<\/a> is to be believed?)”
\nIt was an impossible task, so I figured I’d set some parameters and see what I came up with. I decided on the following rules of thumb:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n