SIL LEAD just posted a great piece on their blog. Here’s how it starts: Imagine if all the English-speaking children you knew suddenly shifted to Esperanto and you knew without a doubt that once they grew up, the English language would disappear from the world forever. Sure, there’d be a written record…. But if nobody was…

Fraser: In 1991-1992, I lived in a small village in Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand. I was there to do PhD research, to survey the range of dialects spoken among refugees from neighboring regions of Myanmar. Beside the linguistic knowledge to be gained, I wanted to know how many “dialects” were distinct languages that might…