Nearly half of the more than 6,000 languages spoken in the world are in danger of extinction. And leading the world's epidemic of disappearing dialects is the U.S. state of California.
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This weekend, members of 40 tribes from around the state met with linguists to discuss the challenges of saving those endangered languages
More than half of the over one hundred native California tongues have disappeared. Many others have only a few, aging speakers. When this last fluent generation dies, languages spoken by Californians over centuries, will also die. At a recent gathering of some 200 Native Americans struggling to maintain their dialects, Robert Geary remembered driving in his car, listening to a tape of his long-deceased great uncle speaking the native Elém Pomo language. "I was so lost hearing my language that I was doing 80 [mph] and I didn't even know it. I got a [speeding] ticket, yeah, I got a ticket." Geary decided he had to learn his ancestor's language and immediately ran into a pervasive problem for California's Native Americans. "There is only one speaker left," he explained. "Her name is Loretta Kelsey. With her also not having anyone to speak it to, the language is even getting lost with her."
At the shoreline of the Pomo reservation on Clear Lake, Loretta Kelsey parts some tule reeds, looks over the blue-green waters to where Mount Konocti reaches for the clouds, then turns toward Geary. It's not a struggle for her to bring back memories of the lake of her childhood; it is a struggle to tell Robert about it, in Pomo. "
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