WASHINGTON – The Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage this week received the largest gift in its history – $1.24 million – to support research into sustaining and revitalizing endangered languages in Europe.
The five-year project will evaluate different approaches to keeping languages healthy, taking into account social, cultural, political and economic influences, said Michael Atwood Mason, director of the center, which is best known for putting on the annual Folklife Festival on the National Mall.
“There’s an enormous amount of excitement about developing well-researched and well-documented evidence about what’s working and what’s not,” Mason said.
The money is coming from Ferring Pharmaceuticals, a manufacturer of drugs for reproductive health, urology and gastroenterology, headquartered in Switzerland.
The very name of the company is derived from an endangered language: Fering, spelled with one r, is a dialect of North Frisian, spoken on the German island of Fohr in the North Sea.
The company’s commitment to cultural and linguistic preservation is a passion of Ferring’s founding family.
The late Frederik Paulsen, a medical student and researcher who fled Germany in the 1930s after being jailed by the Gestapo for political dissidence, founded the company in Sweden in the 1950s and named it in tribute to the community of Feringers on Fohr. Paulsen’s son, also named Frederik, now is chairman of Ferring and is on the advisory council of the Folklife center.
“My family heritage includes Frisian, an endangered language, so I am keenly aware of the importance of language to our identity and our humanity,” the younger Frederik Paulsen said in a written statement.
Thousands of languages around the world are estimated to be in danger of losing their daily use this century. Scores of those are in Europe, from Aranese in the Pyrenees, to the Sami languages in Scandinavia, to Breton in France, Mason said.
All manner of formal and informal efforts are underway to save languages, which are precious conveyors of identities and cosmologies as well as isolated practical knowledge, such as the properties of local plants. The new grant will support six research teams in collaboration with several international organizations to assess various strategies being used to breathe new life into languages.
Europe is a good laboratory because conditions across the continent are relatively even, allowing for comparison and potentially yielding lessons that could be applied elsewhere, Mason said. The languages to be studied haven’t been decided yet.
Language sustainability is a priority across the Smithsonian, whose “Recovering Voices” effort teams the Folklife center with the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Two years ago, a theme of the Folklife Festival was “One World, Many Voices: Endangered Languages and Cultural Heritage.”
