Le Monde dedicates a full page to field linguists who travel across the world like modern-day explorers in search of new languages.

Depicted as twenty-first-century adventurers, they recount their expeditions to distant lands with great detail. Some talk of their discovery of languages yet unknown (at least to westerners, for speakers of those languages did not wait to be discovered in order to exist), while others comment on the dangers incurred, for example when the linguist is a woman.

With regard to linguistic issues in a stricter sense, Alexandre François (who appears in a Sorosoro video shot in Vanuatu) explains how he proceeds to learn languages of which he doesn’t know a single word upon arriving on the field.

As for Jean-Marie Hombert (who lead Sorosoro’s 2009 fieldwork mission to Gabon with the Lake Akele and the Punu), he laments the decline of intergenerational transmission : many children in Africa do not understand their own grandparents when they go back to the village.

Finally Ganesh Devy, who is a council member of Sorosoro India, is mentioned in the article as having made the choice to commit himself beyond linguistic aspects to the cause of indigenous people of his country, and to help them in their development process (read the blog Sorosoro dedicated to him a few months ago).

Read full article on Le Monde‘s website