@NatGeo #extinctlanguages
Over the years I’ve slammed Hip Hop for being straight up comical in its disrespect for itself not to even mention everyone else.  But to be fair, where appropriate I’ve made it my business to highlight those instances that are under reported of the Culture making a positive impact on society.

On such instance is with a new National Geographic program called “Enduring Voices.”  The show which concentrates on the over 3500 languages (nearly half of the world’s total) expected to become extinct by the year 2100.  Illuminati?  New World Order?  Perhaps but the fact remains that modern technology has made the world a smaller place, more accessible and for those small obscure cultures that have existed off the radar and the beaten path for centuries, it has become harder and harder to communicate with the world at large.  To avoid extinction themselves, they’re being forced to leave their languages behind and assimilate.

NatGeo’s new program shows how hip-hop and text messaging are actually helping to keep these languages from extinction.  Check the video of these young people from God knows wherever spitting in their native tongues as a means to document their language.  Kind of ironic huh when you think back to the whole Ebonics fiasco when the misguided and unincluded sought the slaughter of Hip Hop as they believed it disrespected and chopped and screwed the English language.  (Yeah that was the point.  We need more diversity not less but that’s a whole other soapbox.)

On the flip side young folks the use of technology is actually helping keep some languages around and documenting them at the same time.  In New York, the cultural diversity has allowed folks of Haitian, African and other foreign ancestry to covertly encode communication from those around them keeping their communication private.  SMS technology is helping document such activity around the world.  In war-torn areas of the world for instance the use of obscure and endangered languages via text has enabled revolutionary youth to communicate where in a way their enemies can’t decode and at the same time keeping the language alive.

Kind of cool stuff if you think about it.  Since childhood we’ve always though of extinction in terms of animals and dinosaurs but to think that such cultural significance could be wiped from history forever is sad and alarming.  Nat Geo never ceases to amaze me.  Too bad the youth in American culture are too busy being brainwashed by BET to learn something interesting going on just down the dial.

Shout to Scav at Dr. Jays for the heads up