Says who?

MTU News Related stories What's in a word? Linguist revels in and respects UP dialect Glossary For more information, e-mail: remlingk@gvsu.edu vbergval@mtu.edu simon@ipfw.edu Photo courtesy of Michigan Tech Archives/Copper Country Historical Collection

Linguists estimate that there are about 6,000 languages in the world. There were 270 languages spoken in America in the colonial era; now there are fewer than a hundred, and only one native language, Navajo, has more than 100,000 speakers. It is feared that some languages won’t make it to the next century. The mining boom in Upper Michigan attracted immigrants who spoke nearly a score of languages. Virtually all of their descendants spoke only English within two generations. Additional work— Beth Simon of Indiana University-Purdue University has researched the historical aspects of language use in the area—that is, how speakers of other languages learned English, and how they learned reading and writing