Languages Affecting Globalization

Languages Affecting Globalization: How Words Can Change the World

"When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It’s like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre." – Kenneth Hale, 2001

Panelists:

TOM BELT
Elder-in-Residence and Language Instructor, Cherokee Studies Program, West Carolina University

CHRISTINA FREI
Executive Director of Language Instruction, Arts & Sciences

K. DAVID HARRISON
Associate Provost for Academic Programs
 and Professor of Linguistics, Swarthmore College

AMERICO MENDOZA-MORI
Lecturer in Quechua, Penn Language Center

MARGARET NOODIN
Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; President, Studies in American Indian Literatures Association

TIMOTHY POWELL
Faculty, Department of Religious Studies; Consulting Scholar, Penn Museum

KENRIC TSETHLIKAI
Managing Director, Lauder Institute

This panel explores strategies for initiating the Global Turn, to change the world by valuing the intellectual wealth embedded in endangered languages. Panelists will not only discuss the traditional knowledge that is lost when a language becomes extinct, but more affirmatively how the solutions for global challenges benefit from the revitalization of endangered languages. Globalization presents a formidable challenge in its tendency to homogenize markets and flatten biological, linguistic, and cultural diversity. By better understanding how endangered languages encode valuable information, unique to the cultures that preserve those languages, the Penn Language Center seeks to provide a more inclusive and empowering narrative of globalization: one that emphasizes and implements the economic, educational, and environmental value of language diversity.