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WASHINGTON (AP) - Thousands of languages are threatened with extinction, and the U.S. government is trying to help save some of them, from the one used by Cherokee Indians to a language spoken by a small group of people in Tibet but never written down.
The project awards $4.4 million to 26 institutions and 13 individual scholars to investigate the status of more than 70 languages among the 6,000 to 7,000 in the world.
About half of those languages "are threatened with oblivion," according to the two U.S. agencies involved in the project.
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