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September 21 and 24, 2010: Sorosoro in the « Nouvelles Calédoniennes »!
Last week we mentioned the Festival of Melanesian Arts held in New Caledonia from September 12 to 24, during which a Symposium on Melanesian Languages was being organized by the Académie des Langues Kanak. Sorosoro attended through the presence of our program’s Director, Rozenn Milin, who spoke at the conference.
Her lecture led to a fair amount of media coverage: Rozenn was interviewed on the RFO TV news, Radio Rythme Bleu and Radio Australia, as well as the daily paper Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes… twice!
In the first interview, on September 21, she mentioned the linguistic wealth of Melanesia, counting no less than 1000 languages out of the 6000 spoken across the planet. She also observed that many of these languages find themselves potentially threatened with extinction from the moment they lack an official status or/and are spoken by a limited number of speakers.
Rozenn was once more to be found in the paper on September 24, for a longer interview this time: a chance to specify the different levels of vulnerability of Kanak languages, and evoke the questions of script and ways of revitalizing these languages.