Endangered Languages & Evolving Thai with Linguist Rikker Dockum [Season 3, Episode 22]

What if you got into a time machine and jumped forward a
few hundred years, only to discover when you arrived that no one
spoke your language anymore? It's happened plenty of times (not
the time machine thing, but languages dying out), so we
wondered...could it happen to Thai?


Greg interviews friend of the show Rikker
Dockum, a linguist finishing his PhD at Yale, who
has been doing research in northwest Burma on a local dialect
that is part of the same family of languages as Thai. After
discussing this unusual dialect, Greg and Rikker chat about the
modern Thai language and how it has slowly splintered and changed
over time, including a few interesting tidbits into why Thais
call Google 'Uncle Goo' and why the Thai translation of the
Forrest Gump novel used a very specific spelling of a particular
word. To wrap it up, Rikker gives us his thoughts on 'language
death' and what role the forces of globalization and modern
technology play.


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