Estonian linguists and the Livonian language
Monday, October 11, 2010
Here's an interesting video on the Livonian language featuring a few talks (mostly in Latvian) with an old Livonian woman who talks about her mother tongue as well as efforts by Estonian linguists who came to visit her and the area a number of times, who would spend a great deal of time with her asking her to name pretty much everything she saw. The video gets interesting after about a minute in, and she's just shearing a sheep's wool in the beginning so don't worry (I thought for a moment in the beginning that it was going to be about animal sacrifice in Livonia).
As is often the case in countries that are stable, free and relatively prosperous, language revival is a fairly easy thing to do and apparently Livonian has a few dozen fluent (though not native) speakers again after technically dying out.
Livonian also has a test Wikipedia here.