Google wants to help save the world?s lost languages

Help save the world's cultural identity, one word at a time

In an effort to help preserve some of the world's rarest languages,?Google has teamed up with various universities and cultural diversity organizations to form the?Endangered Languages Project. The company is providing assistance to these groups to build a vast database of information on thousands of languages that are at risk of being completely forgotten.

According to the Endangered Languages Project, roughly 3,500 unique languages are at risk of being wiped out within the next century. As each language disappears, so does a piece of each culture's identity, and the spoken history of each group is threatened. You can explore the location of each threatened language using the?built-in interactive map on the project's website, and even add your own input if you have special knowledge of a language on the site.

Some of the cultural preservation advocates on board the project include the Alaska Native Language Archive, the Indigenous Language Institute, and various schools such as UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania. With so many people working to preserve these rare dialects, there is undoubtedly a greater chance to save them than ever before.

[via?Flowing Data]

This article originally appeared on Tecca

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