Languages in the Attic: Constructing Your Language Family Tree
As you and several classmates share your linguistic family trees, try to identify interesting patterns in language maintenance, shift, and change.
1. How do these patterns reflect social, cultural,economic, and political realities in the lives of your parents and forebears?
2. How do men’s and women’s or boys’ and girls’ experiences differ?
Other activities include (1) making a graph of all attic languages in your class to see how numbers compare; (2) identifying the number of languages that came from each continent in the world; and (3) researching and identifying the world language
families represented in the class . Finally, don’t miss the opportunity to highlight
and share feelings of wonder and pride in the linguistic diversity of your particular group of students.