There are over 6,500 languages that are spoken all over the world but currently more than half of them are under threat of extinction.
The Brunei Gallery at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is currently hosting a photographic- sound exhibition, by John Wynne called Hearing Voices, which runs until September 23, 2005.
 |  | Lone Tree Woman © SOAS. |
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Split into two rooms, the exhibition uses modern sound equipment to ‘stretch’ the sounds of the highly endangered Khoi and San African languages. Some of the sounds have been stretched to a great degree and multiple sounds have been combined to create the effect of a single note.
The first room hosts the photographs of the people whose voices have been used in the exhibition. Shot at the time of recording, the sounds that now come from each photograph have been derived from the voice of that person.
They seem rather strange. Maybe even a bit confusing. There is a certain depth to the voice but they sound like they are trying to find out where they fit into the entire realm of things.
!Kun © SOAS. | |  |
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Some consonants of these languages have also been emphasised and isolated and have been interspersed with bell tones.
The adjoining room hosts an interactive CD ROM, which has all the recordings in the original form along with their translations in English. There are also posters with facts about endangered languages and maps highlighting areas on the globe where these languages come from.
From these posters we learn that 96 per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by just four per cent of its population. The majority of the world’s people are multilingual. People who can speak only one language are scarcely found in continents other than Europe.
 | | Cukuri Dako © SOAS. |
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Most of the currently endangered languages are not spoken in isolation but in contact with the surrounding communities speaking other socially and economically stronger languages. However, due to globalisation, these regional languages are losing their ground with the natives not speaking them anymore and instead using economically strong languages.
David Toop, internationally recognised writer and performer of contemporary music and sound practice commented on the work of John Wynne saying: “John Wynne’s work addresses the issues of language directly….as one of the many destructive effects of globalisation, languages are disappearing”
Toop believes there are a limited number of possibilities that exist to address this crisis – sound recording and preservation being one of them. “Through his research and practise in Botswana, recording click (African) language speech by performers at the beginning of a process, Wynne constructs an experience that flickers on the boundaries between speech and sound, and the various levels of meaning that can be derived from human communications.”
Thamae Sobe © SOAS. | |  |
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The exhibition is in collaboration with The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, which aims to document endangered languages.
Hearing Voices takes sound and turns it into art. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath is an important message - one that is important for survival and the progression of the human race.
Languages are the key to knowledge, culture and history; the loss of a language not only represents a blow to the individual community but also represents a loss of human knowledge and cultural diversity.
 | | Shruti Ganapathy is the 24 Hour Museum Untold London Student Journalist covering heritage and diversity stories in the capital.
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