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- [Narrator] Of the[br]roughly 7,000 languages

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spoken and signed on Earth,

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about 500 of them are currently[br]at risk of disappearing

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as the number of native speakers dwindles.

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This is the story about one man

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dispatching an army of volunteers

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to record these languages[br]before it's too late.

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(pleasant music)

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

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of Wikitongues, a non-profit powered

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by more than a thousand[br]volunteers around the world

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working to preserve, promote, and pass on

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every language to the next generation.

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Every day, hundreds of[br]volunteers around the world

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are recording videos.

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(foreign languages)

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I help keep track of all of these videos

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as they're submitted, so[br]that they can be reused

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for educational and cultural purposes.

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New York is very important[br]to linguistic diversity.

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New York is, by most statistics,

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the most linguistically[br]diverse city in the world.

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There are as many as 800 languages

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spoken in and around the five boroughs.

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In many cases it can be[br]easier for communities

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to maintain their languages here

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than it is to maintain[br]their languages at home.

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Today we're gonna meet up[br]with Wikitongues volunteers

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who are going to be taking us

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through different parts of New York.

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So we're gonna speak to you, Locano.

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Yeah!

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Wikitongues focuses on[br]recording oral histories,

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which is a fancy way of saying

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talking about yourself and your culture.

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Sometimes people barely talk[br]about their language at all

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and they just talk about their daily job,

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in their language of course.

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Sometimes people talk about the history

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of their language and their culture.

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(foreign language)

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- My name is Elfie Goliat.

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I will speak Aru language.

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(foreign language)

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The Wikitongues approach[br]is: record everything

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and classify it later.

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What I do is make sure[br]that all of that content

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

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

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(foreign languages)

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Wikitongues has recorded[br]over 435 languages

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from over 70 countries.

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That number changes every day.

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There are plenty examples of languages

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being brought back from the dead;

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there's Cornish, there's[br]Hebrew, there's Tunica.

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All of these languages[br]had one thing in common:

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when the last native speaker[br]died, there were materials

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for the cultural descendants[br]to bring them back.

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And so building an open archive

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of every language in the[br]world is not just a way

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of ensuring that people today can promote

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and teach their languages[br]to the next generation.

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It's a way of ensuring[br]that future generations

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can revive their languages[br]even if they go extinct.