Talking about the landscape – before the languages die out

Linguists are in a race against time and estimate that half of all the world’s languages will be extinct within a century. In Lund, Niclas Burenhult and his research team have launched a project that spreads across all continents, from the Amazonian rainforest to Älvdalen in Sweden and East Timor. “When we applied for funding, time was an important factor; this must be done now, before it is too late”, says Niclas Burenhult, a Reader in Linguistics. The funding was granted; Niclas Burenhult became the first humanities scholar in Sweden to receive an ERC Starting Grant. The LACOLA project (Language, Cognition and Landscape) is now underway and some of the researchers have already been out in the field to collect language data. The aim of the project is to map how people in different cultures perceive and talk about the landscape, before the smallest and most original languages have died out. The six languages being studied are all under threat and represent a part of the linguistic diversity that is disappearing.