Talk:Dameli language

Endangerment

The article claims that the language is dying out, but according to Emil Perder, a Ph.D. student at Stockholm University who is currently working on a doctor's thesis on the language and has conducted field studies, this is not true. There are only about 5,000 speakers but according to him, children are being taught the language and people who move in to the area are expected to learn the language. Any comments on this?

Peter ^Isotalo 10:34, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

As Peter has already brought the matter up, I have finally gotten around to doing some changes to this article.

• A part accusing the Dameli people of robbery, based on nothing but "so they say" was removed and the passage rewritten into a rather short geographic description.

• A passage on study carried out by "serious linguists" was considerably rewritten to reflect the fact that there has been an insightful though short article out since 1942.

• A passage claiming that the language is dying out and people changing to Khowar was replaced by a description of the patterns of second-language use based on Kendall Decker (1992).

While I will probably make some considerable changes to this page in the near future, the bulk of my updates must probably wait till after my dissertation is published, to avoid violating the rule of No original research. Still, expect some more updates in the near future.

One possibly controversial point that I may as well bring up now is that I probably mean to reinstate the link to Richard Strand's Nuristan site previously removed. While this site is arguably a "personal home page", it is one of the best sources of academic research of high quality on a seriously understudied area, by an author who has previously published on the subject in academic journals.

Emil — Preceding undated comment added 20:06, 20 November 2006‎ (UTC)