Worthwhile Investment?
by AJpublished on
Is the investment in these languages really worthwhile?
Recently a colleague asked a very valid question: how do you know that your five Berber languages really merit the huge investment required to dub audio-visual productions for them?
Fortunately we are not the first workers to have asked ourselves this question. Language specialists all over the world are concerned about the current status and the future prospects of many languages. SIL in their ethnologue use the following scale to rate languages:
Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale
Using this scale we find that all our five chosen languages are either (5) developing or (6a) vigourous. See below for the results for the countries that we focus on:
Morocco (the languages we are working on are underlined)
Algeria (the languages we are working on are underlined)
Mali (the languages we are working on are underlined)
