Saving Languages From Extinction

Tunica, Osing, Sorani Kurdish and Dutch sign language—these are among about 500 languages considered critically endangered. With only a handful of speakers, and no active movement to revive the language, they could be lost to time. Thankfully, Daniel Bögre Udell is listening. The co-founder and director of Wikitongues is working with volunteers from all around the world to create an open video archive of people speaking and signing rarely used languages so they can be preserved and passed on to future generations. If we were fluent, we’d thank Daniel in every language we could.

If you'd like to learn more about these endangered languages, check out Wikitongues YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBgWgQyEb5eTzvh4lLcuipQ

And hear more from Elfie speaking Bahasa Aru right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iE0R8b3tq4

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#Language #Culture #History

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(narrator) Of the roughly 7,000 languages
spoken and signed on Earth,

about 500 of them are currently
at risk of disappearing,

as the number of native speakers dwindles.

This is the story about one man
dispatching an army of volunteers

to record these languages
before it's too late.

♪ (pleasant music) ♪

My name is Daniel,
and I'm the co-founder and director

of Wikitongues, a non-profit powered

by more than a thousand
volunteers around the world

working to preserve, promote, and pass on

every language to the next generation.

Every day, hundreds
of volunteers around the world

are recording videos.

(foreign language)

(speaking in Tunica)

I help keep track of all of these videos

as they're submitted,
so that they can be reused

for educational and cultural purposes.

(subway and Street sounds)

New York is very important
to linguistic diversity.

New York is, by most statistics,

the most linguistically diverse
city in the world.

There are as many as 800 languages

spoken in and around the five boroughs.

In many cases,
it can be easier for communities

to maintain their languages here

than it is to maintain
their languages at home.

(subway noise)

Today, we're gonna meet up
with Wikitongues volunteers

who are going to be taking us
through different parts of New York.

♪ (cheerful music) ♪

- So we're gonna speak Ilocano.
- Yeah, okay.

Yeah!

Wikitongues focuses
on recording oral histories,

which is a fancy way of saying

talking about yourself and your culture.

Sometimes people barely talk
about their language at all,

and they just talk about their daily job,

in their language, of course.

(subway noise)

Sometimes people talk about the history

of their language and their culture.

(speaking Aruan Malay)

My name is Elfie Goliat.
I will speak Aru language.

(speaking Aruan Malay)

(speaking Aruan Malay)

The Wikitongues approach is:
record everything and classify it later.

What I do is make sure
that all of that content

gets tracked and archived,
so it doesn't get lost

and so it can be used
for posterity and in the long term.

(speaking in Bavarian)

Wikitongues has recorded
over 435 languages

from over 70 countries.

(speaking Oshiwambo)

That number changes every day.

(speaking Haryanvi)

There are plenty of examples of languages
being brought back from the dead.

There's Cornish, there's
Hebrew, there's Tunica.

All of these languages
had one thing in common:

when the last native speaker died,
there were materials

for the cultural descendants
to bring them back.

And so building an open archive

of every language in the world
is not just a way

of ensuring that people today can promote

and teach their languages
to the next generation.

It's a way of ensuring
that future generations

can revive their languages
even if they go extinct.