The goal of the initiative was to make sure that testimony to these language cultures, which are mostly only passed on by word of mouth, is recorded for future generations. This is achieved in a digital archive of endangered languages, the DobeS Portal of the "Language Archive" in Nijmegen, Netherlands (dobes.mpi.nl).
Lecture at the final conference
Only a fraction of the more than 1,500 languages spoken in the South Seas today will survive the 21st century.
Linguist Ulrike Mosel from the University of Kiel, and Nicholas Evans, linguist at the Australian National University Canberra, illustrate the example of three South-Sea languages (the Australian Iwaidja, the Papuan-language Nen and the Oceanic Teop) as part of their projects on "Documentation of Threatened Languages".