An Esl Experience

A strange landscape awaits the human race; a world population exceeding 9 billion will have less to say then ever before. In fact, if trends continue as they are, half of the 7000 languages currently spoken throughout the world will be extinct by the time the Earth’s population peaks. Are we, as ESL instructors, part of this problem? How big a part does ESL play in this mass extinction? Dr Mandana Seffdinipur, linguist, TED talker, and director of the largest endangered languages archive in the world at SOAS, speaks about her institution’s fight against the clock to preserve these dying languages before the voices that speak the universality of humanity vanish forever.