Endangered languages broaden our horizon
Conference “Geographic Grounding” at the University of Copenhagen 30-31 May 2016 was well-attended and featured speakers from five continents.
Presenting studies from 20 languages spoken on five continents, the conference focused on the relationships between spatial language, cognition and community practices while investigating place-marking systems as parts of ecological and cultural niches.
Keynotes at the conference were: Niclas Burenhult (University of Lund), Michael Fortescue (University of Copenhagen) and Gabriela Pérez Báez (Smithsonian Institution).
The languages of the world vary both in the spatial concepts they require their speakers to hold and in the degree of routine attention to landscape they demand. The diversity that the world’s languages display with regard to communication about place and direction helps us understand the flexibility of human strategies for orientation and for adapting to specific environments. The need to address these issues of human communication is urgent because many of these languages are highly endangered and may be lost in few years.