Wikitongues Aims to Save Dying Languages
According to the United Nations, about half of the world's 6,500 languages are in danger of disappearing. But a New York-based organization, called Wikitongues, is trying to change that.
Wikitongues' goal is simple: to help save languages by giving people a chance to connect with others who also want to keep languages alive. The organization, which is run by volunteers from around the world, launched in 2016 as a collection of world languages.
The collection is made up of language videos that people add to the Wikitongues website. More than 400 languages and dialects can be seen on the Wikitongues’ YouTube channel. Some languages, like English, Farsi and Mandarin, are spoken by hundreds of millions of people. Others are less common. Bora, for example, is spoken by only a few thousand people in Peru and Colombia.
One of Wikitongues’ volunteers is Theron Kolokwe. His native language is Subiya, which is spoken by about 30,000 people in Namibia, Zambia and Botswana. However, he does not get the chance to speak his native language every day.
“I want the world to know about my language,” Kolokwe said. He is hoping Wikitongues can help stop Subiya and other African languages from disappearing.
Daniel Bogre Udell, the co-founder of Wikitongues, says that part of a community's culture can be lost when a language disappears. Udell says more than 1,500 people from 70 different countries have added videos to Wikitongues so far.
