Voices Of The World

Voices Of The World - television documentary on SBS Television in Australia
7.30 pm 4 April 2008

How many languages are there in the world? There could be as many as 10,000 languages or as few as 4,000 languages. Whatever the number, half of those languages are likely to disappear within the next hundred years. Filmed across the globe in countries as diverse as Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Denmark, Egypt, Greenland, Iran, Mozambique, Nepal, Spain and Vietnam, Voices of the World offers a profound vision of a world where languages and cultures are disappearing. Every time a language is lost, one vision of the world disappears. Languages encode and encapsulate the culture of a people and this includes their music, their poetry, their songs and their stories. Language defines who we are. When a language disappears humanity itself is diminished. (From Denmark, in English, Danish, Arabic, and Mlabri, English subtitles) (Documentary) PG CC

Some interesting history of the Voices of the World Project can be found at http://www.ciplnet.com/voicesoftheworld2004.html and taught me that it is an initiative of UNESCO’s Goodwill Ambassador for Languages Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, based on an original idea by Janus Billeskov Jansen. She was 4th president of Iceland, and a tireless worker for education, human rights and women's rights. H. E. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir gave an address for the first International Mother Language Day celebration in 2006. Mrs Finnbogadóttir qualified languages as “humanity’s most precious and fragile treasures.”