cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/cool/p/1517755/game-designed-to-save-dying-aboriginal-language-wins-global-awards
With only eight fluent Nyiyaparli speakers remaining, an Aboriginal group is racing against time to save its 41,000-year-old language.
What is the distinction between saving and preserving a language?
This might not be totally the right definition, but I think it is:
Latin is dead, but we still understand it. There’s no one left who speaks it really, but we know how to use it.
Isn’t the ‘dead’ part more that nobody speaks it as a mother tongue any more, so it doesn’t really evolve like a living language would even though it’s still spoken in specific contexts? I think it contrasts with an extinct language which nobody speaks for any reason.
I’m just guessing what they meant but I took it as the difference between:
saving = getting enough people to keep speaking it that it remains a living language
preserving = documenting it for posterity so that it is not utterly forgotten for all time