Loris Taylor, president of Native Public Media, leads off a story in The Atlantic on how radio is being used to resurrect dead and dying languages. The mag reports that Taylor has lobbied the FCC and supported projects to get “increasingly rare tongues like Hopi” onto the airwaves. And it’s happening worldwide: Radio producers from Peru, Mexico, Canada, El Salvador and other countries met in Washington, D.C., earlier this month for the “Our Voices on the Air” conference for indigenous speakers.
“Following centuries of oppression that have marginalized minority languages,” The Atlantic notes, “radio represents a modest but surprisingly promising way to reinvigorate the traditions keeping those languages alive.”