Linguistics Professor's Work on
Dying Languages Featured in Design Observer

Speakers of thousands of the world's languages are now abandoning their ancestral tongues at an unprecedented rate.  What is lost when a language dies? And what are the implications? 

"Languages are the repository of thousands of years of a people's science and art - from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths," says Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison (right), whose book, When Languages Die, is reviewed in Design Observer. "Languages are design objects," writes Michael Erhard.  "And I thought: no one loves extinct or endangered design objects more than designers do." Read more.

Harrison has received extensive international media coverage for his work, appearing most recently in The Independent in South Africa and Great Britain's Telegraph, among others. He was also profiled in a recent issue of American University's alumni magazine. Find more here.