(narrator) <i>Of the roughly 7,000 languages
spoken and signed on Earth,</i>

<i>about 500 of them are currently
at risk of disappearing,</i>

<i>as the number of native speakers dwindles.</i>

<i>This is the story about one man
dispatching an army of volunteers</i>

<i>to record these languages
before it's too late.</i>

♪ (pleasant music) ♪

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

<i>of Wikitongues, a non-profit powered</i>

<i>by more than a thousand
volunteers around the world</i>

<i>working to preserve, promote, and pass on</i>

<i>every language to the next generation.</i>

Every day, hundreds
of volunteers around the world

are recording videos.

(foreign language)

(speaking in Tunica)

<i>I help keep track of all of these videos</i>

<i>as they're submitted,
so that they can be reused</i>

<i>for educational and cultural purposes.</i>

(subway and Street sounds)

<i>New York is very important
to linguistic diversity.</i>

<i>New York is, by most statistics,</i>

<i>the most linguistically diverse
city in the world.</i>

<i>There are as many as 800 languages</i>

<i>spoken in and around the five boroughs.</i>

<i>In many cases,
it can be easier for communities</i>

<i>to maintain their languages here</i>

<i>than it is to maintain
their languages at home.</i>

(subway noise)

<i>Today, we're gonna meet up
with Wikitongues volunteers</i>

<i>who are going to be taking us
through different parts of New York.</i>

♪ (cheerful music) ♪

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

Yeah!

<i>Wikitongues focuses
on recording oral histories,</i>

<i>which is a fancy way of saying</i>

<i>talking about yourself and your culture.</i>

<i>Sometimes people barely talk
about their language at all,</i>

<i>and they just talk about their daily job,</i>

<i>in their language, of course.</i>

(subway noise)

<i>Sometimes people talk about the history</i>

<i>of their language and their culture.</i>

(speaking Aruan Malay)

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

(speaking Aruan Malay)

(speaking Aruan Malay)

<i>The Wikitongues approach is:
record everything and classify it later.</i>

What I do is make sure
that all of that content

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

<i>and so it can be used
for posterity and in the long term.</i>

(speaking in Bavarian)

<i>Wikitongues has recorded
over 435 languages</i>

<i>from over 70 countries.</i>

(speaking Oshiwambo)

<i>That number changes every day.</i>

(speaking Haryanvi)

<i>There are plenty of examples of languages
being brought back from the dead.</i>

<i>There's Cornish, there's
Hebrew, there's Tunica.</i>

<i>All of these languages
had one thing in common:</i>

<i>when the last native speaker died,
there were materials</i>

<i>for the cultural descendants
to bring them back.</i>

<i>And so building an open archive</i>

<i>of every language in the world
is not just a way</i>

<i>of ensuring that people today can promote</i>

<i>and teach their languages
to the next generation.</i>

<i>It's a way of ensuring
that future generations</i>

<i>can revive their languages
even if they go extinct.</i>