Фонд Наследия Исчезающих Языков | Language Endangerment & Heritage Foundation

WEST POLESSIAN LANGUAGE

This language can be considered that unknown relative that you would see only whilst rare family parties 😵‍💫 West Polessian is an Eastern Slavic language, which is spoken in Southwestern Belarus (Brest Region) and Northwestern Ukraine (Volhynia). Some people consider this language a Belarusian dialect, some Ukrainian one and others a separate language. In the XIX century Franz Savič has written poems in this language. Ivan Kuprin had used some Polessian dialectisms in his works. According to data online West Polessian is spoken by approximately 11 thousands people. Moreover, linguists started to form the Standard language in 1988. In the picture I've attached above you can see its alphabet.

What kind of irony is this

Чолöм! hello! Thankfully to a reporter, who helped with writing interview about the Komi language, new article is out in Russian 💚
https://lehf.jezmunh.site/blog/post/yazyk-komi-vzglyad-prostogo-zhitelya-na-yazykovuyu-situaciyu?lang=ru

For your information, if you haven't noticed yet - all posts (expect for the forwarded one) are written in English as this project is international, so it would be logical to inform people in lingua franca.

However, my site has got localisations, hence this project is still accessible for those who can't speak any English.

Article about Kalmyk has been translated into English:
https://lehf.jezmunh.site/blog/post/kalmyckij-yazyk-istoriya-kotoraya-mozhet-ischeznut?lang=en

👀

Happy International Mother Language Day!

This holiday was firstly announced in 1999 by UNESCO and celebrated on February 21st in honour of the Bengali language movement in Bangladesh. This day was established to remind people that there is a lot of different cultures and languages in the world.

I congratulate everyone with a such day and wish you all good things!

Project finally got its own "not found" page

(I'll continue posting here and there)

I've just signed up a new social page for our project on Mastodon (a social network similar to Twitter). Remarkably, you can offer your language and join the translators team for the Mastodon site and this social network is relatively a new one.
Link: https://mastodon.social/@lehf

RSS FEED IS NOW AVAILABLE
A few minutes ago a new site's feature has been implemented. Frankly speaking for regular users nothing substantial has happened, but this "RSS" thing is important for search engines, geeks who read only articles via readers and whatnot. You can find the respective link at the site footer (bottom part with copyright and links).

SCOTS
Scots is a West Germanic language. As you could have already guessed by its name, this language is spoken in Scotland, the UK. No, Scots and Scottish Gaelic are not the same languages as the latter one being a Celtic language (related to Irish). Approximately 1,5 million know how to speak the Scots language. As you can see in the picture I attached above, Scots is quite similar to English. According to the data I found online, Scots derived from English in like the XIV century, which explains their similarity. Scots has experienced influence of other Germanic languages and Celtic ones.

KASHUBIAN
So far, it's been the third endangered language I'm going to tell you about. Kashubian is a West Slavic language, spoken in Pomerania region, Poland. Kashubian is related to Polish, it uses the Latin alphabet as well. Kashubian has experienced the German influence. In 2005, Kashubian has been recognised as a minority language in Poland, which means language is eligible for the state support, street signs can be translated into Kashubian and you can study this language at universities. As far as I know, you can study the Kashubian philology in the University of Gdańsk (Poland). According to some sources, the total number of Kashubian speakers is less than 100,000 people (87,600). Beneath you can see the sample of Kashubian as a translation of the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 👇

Wszëtczi lëdze rodzą sã wòlny ë równy w swòji czëstnoce ë swòjich prawach. Mają òni dostóne rozëm ë sëmienié ë nôlégô jima pòstãpòwac wobec drëdzich w dëchù bracënotë.

CHUVASH
Last time I told you about Yiddish. This time you will find out about the Chuvash language! Chuvash is a turkic language spoken in Russia. This language is sort of the unique language, because it's the only nowadays spoken language from the Bulgar group. Despite being spoken near areas where Tatar and Bashkir spoken, this language is not mutually intelligible to any of the aforementioned languages. Chuvash is written in Cyrillic with special letters. The usage of Chuvash is being reduced over time, so the Chuvash language is definitely endangered

HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE YIDDISH LANGUAGE?
There is a popular delusion that Yiddish and Hebrew are the same languages, so Yiddish is just a second name of the language. This is completely wrong. Historically, Yiddish has been spoken across the Europe and America and previously this language was called "Judeo German" due to its similarity to German. Yes, Yiddish is a Germanic languages, which means is related to English (🤯), but if it's a European language, why does it use the Jewish script, you may ask me. The "yiddish" word translates as "Jewish", so there is no any inconsistency, right? Perhaps Yiddish has been using the Jewish script throughout its story. Nowadays Yiddish is gradually being overlooked, so this language is classified as vulnerable (the first step in the classification of the endangered languages). You can look at the picture I attached, so you would see how Jewish looks like.

💥 LANGUAGE QUIZ
YES! Now you can try your best to guess the endangered language by seeing its text fragment. Language is the same for everyone, also it's being changed daily. You get 5 attempts to guess the language. I liked a language game called Lingule, where you also need to guess the language, so I created my own version, but for endangered languages :)