- [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 languages)
I help keep track of all of these videos
as they're submitted, so that they can be reused
for educational and cultural purposes.
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.
Today we're gonna meet up with Wikitongues volunteers
who are going to be taking us
through different parts of New York.
So we're gonna speak to you, Locano.
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.
Sometimes people talk about the history
of their language and their culture.
(foreign language)
- My name is Elfie Goliat.
I will speak Aru language.
(foreign language)
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.
(foreign languages)
Wikitongues has recorded over 435 languages
from over 70 countries.
That number changes every day.
There are plenty 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.