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£20m TO SAVE MINORITY LANGUAGES

Lisbet Rausing, heir of Britain’s richest family, has given £20m to fund a research project run from London to record languages around the world that are at risk of extinction.

The donation by Ms Rausing of Hans Rausing, the founder of TetraPak, is thought to be one of the biggest gifts for research in humanities.

About £2.5m will go to the linguistic department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, known as Soas, a college of London University. It will endow a Marit Rausing professorship in field linguistics (in honour of Ms Rausing’s mother, a lecturer in linguistic documentation), two post-doctoral fellows, and up to three PhD students at a time.

About £15m will be given in grants over 10 years to document endangered languages, allowing international researchers to bid for money to monitor languages. The remainder is for administration. Barry Supple, a retired economic historian, will chair the panel.

Graham Furniss, dean of the faculty of languages and culture at Soas, said that, of the world’s 6,000 languages, some 94% were spoken by only 6% of its population. Only one in three of existing languages has a literary tradition. Researchers at Manchester University have warned that 90% of the 6,000 languages could have disappeared by 2050.

THE GUARDIAN, Aug. 9, 2002