Those Canadians come up with some great ideas from time to time, see maple syrup and curling, and they've done it again with the thought of a monument to the world's languages (the only monument of its kind in the world). Why a monument to language? Because they're being erased at incredible speed. A language is being lost every two weeks worldwide. Muhammad Islam, who is the man behind the project states, "Six languages from British Columbia's First Nations [alone] are at risk of extinction." He wants to raise $200,000 for the project, which will try to include "all languages." That, by the way, is a lot of languages. As of early 2007, there were 6,912 known living human languages (497 of which are nearly extinct due to downward trends in their usage). Some different languages out there, for your edification, include Argobba, spoken in Ethiopia, Oropom of northeastern Uganda and Zhuang, spoken by residents of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China.
And, by the way, for a great book about the English language, Bill Bryson of "A Walk in the Woods" fame has written an easily accessible and very fascinating story about our language's history: The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way.
The story about the language monument is care of The Province newspaper in Canada.
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