Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

years, she has used records from the 17 th century to
write a dictionary, develop educational materials,
and run adult language classes. 98 this example shows
that language reclamation is possible with significant
effort and also underscores the importance of
creating an orthography and maintaining written
documentation of endangered languages, in case
they do become extinct.
Past international Action
The issue of language endangerment first caught
the attention of the international community in
the early 1990s with the 15th international Congress
of Linguists in 1992. The gathering of linguistic
experts from around the world to discuss the fate of
endangered languages marked the first time that this
problem had been the topic of a major international
gathering. The final report of the 15th international
Congress of Linguists called upon the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), a specialized agency of the UN, to initiate
a documentation campaign to record the grammars,
texts, and oral histories of the endangered languages
of the world. 99 uNeSCO did, in fact, respond to the
appeal from the International Congress of Linguists,
and the following year, the organization officially
made endangered languages one of its priority issues
and founded the Red Book of Endangered Languages,
a compilation of information on the thousands of
endangered and dying languages across the globe.
The International Clearing House of Endangered
Languages was founded at the University of Tokyo
in 1995 to coordinate the research and publication of
the Red Book. the Red Book has since been replaced
by the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, which
continues to be published to this day. 100
Outside of this action by UNESCO, however, the
United Nations has been rather silent on the issue of
endangered languages. uNeSCO has assisted local
activists and organizations in efforts to revitalize
endangered languages, but it has not made any
meaning for declarations of what must be done to
secure the futures of dying languages. Most of the
relevant UN resolutions on the topic have been about
minority rights or cultural diversity more generally,
and not specifically about endangered languages. In
1992, the General Assembly passed the Declaration
on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or
Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. The first
article of this resolution declares that “states shall
protect the…linguistic identity…of minorities within
their respective territories.” 101 Articles Two and Four
go on to assert the rights of indigenous language
speakers to learn their mother tongue, use it in the
public and private sphere without discrimination, and
receive education in the language. 102 the Action Plan
of the 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural
Diversity calls upon nations to protect linguistic
heritage, to support the production and dissemination
of culture in as many languages as possible, and to
encourage linguistic diversity in education and on the
internet. 103 uNeSCO also indirectly called upon nations
to support endangered languages by calling language
“the vehicle of intangible cultural heritage” in the
2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible
Cultural Heritage and by emphasizing the importance
of linguistic diversity in cultural diversity in the 2005
Convention on the Promotion and Protection of the
104 ,105
Diversity of Cultural Expressions.
While the United Nations has been inactive on the
issue of language endangerment and language rights
more generally, a community of activists has not. In
1996, at the World Conference on Linguistic Rights
in Barcelona, a group of writers, linguistics, and
anthropologists adopted the Universal Declaration
on Linguistic Rights, also known as the Barcelona
declaration. the Barcelona declaration was drafted
in response to the ever-increasing number of
endangered languages across the world and the lack
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