WIKITONGUES INC
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Mission Statement
Wikitongues is a non-profit platform for every language in the world. Powered by an international volunteer community of 800 contributors on every continent, from the Pacific nation of Vanuatu to Finland, we’re building the first public archive of the world’s more than 7,000 languages. Through this archive, we’re amassing a sizable linguistic dataset in the form of video oral histories, both in languages as widely spoken as Bengali, and those classified by UNESCO as endangered, like Tsakonika, a minority language of Greece. Many are rarely published online, such as Nafasana, an unclassified language from Vanuatu. Our content is generally released under creative commons licensing. We also develop and maintain open source technology for language documentation and exchange, and contribute widely to open source, open data, and free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia and the Queens Library’s Queens Memory Project in New York City. We currently have no salaried staff and are entirely volunteer-run.
About This Cause
WHY WIKITONGUES? Wikitongues is a platform for every language in the world, powered by hundreds of volunteers on every continent. To be sure, we’re not the only organization dedicated to preserving the world’s linguistic diversity. Around the world, academic institutions, researchers, and local activists are doing hard, meaningful work to document the spectrum of human expression. However, these initiatives have tended to approached language preservation with strictly academic, centralized, or localized methods that cannot be scaled at pace with current rates of language loss. Wikitongues is unique because we are broad and scalable in our approach. Through our wide-reaching volunteer network, we bridge the gap between global and local, between the academy and the grassroots. Through our work, we are able to connect trained linguists with speakers of under-documented languages, and foster networks of solidarity between cultural activists around the world. WHAT IS LANGUAGE LOSS? Language loss is the process of losing your mother tongue, a pandemic phenomenon affecting nearly half the world’s cultures. In fact, in the next eighty years, at least 3,000 languages are expected to disappear. A catastrophic tragedy on an intimate, human scale, the death of thousands of languages means not just the loss of grammar systems and vocabularies but the collapse of the communities who use them. Apologists for this reality often argue that culture is dynamic, and that languages have always gone extinct to make room for new ones. After all, there would be no French without the death of Latin, and no English had Old Saxon not faded away. While this is without a doubt, the twenty-first century’s rate of language loss is unprecedented. It stems not from the natural ebb and flow of human diversity, but rather from the marginalizing forces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when governments enforcing assimilation began pressuring minorities to abandon their cultures and adopt arbitrarily-defined ‘national languages’. While most explicit persecution has largely subsided, little has been done in reparation. Today, with as few as 5% of the world’s languages recognized by governments or serviced by media and technology, communities impacted by language loss receive little to no support from the public or private sectors. And as the side effects of climate change, economic globalization, and humanitarian crises provoke a rise in forced migration, more and more communities are poised to experience language loss—and with it, the potential collapse of their cultures. WHERE IS LANGUAGE LOSS HAPPENNING? With rare exception, language loss is happening everywhere in the world. Indeed, almost every country is home to marginalized language communities struggling to preserve their cultures within the structures of globalization. For instance, though the United States is often described as an "English-speaking" country (or at best, a bilingual society of English and Spanish), it is home to at least 140 native languages. Of these, the vast majority are at risk. Locally, there are regions on every continent where language loss occurs at higher densities, due to historical and contemporary political conditions. Oklahoma in the United States, the Andean regions of Bolivia and Peru, the provinces of northern Australia, and the easternmost reaches of Siberia are all home to historically persecuted indigenous populations whose linguistic heritage is in jeopardy of disappearing within a generation. In Southeast Asia, rapid urbanization manifests as forced assimilation for traditionally rural language minorities. Humanitarian crises also contribute to the phenomenon of language loss. The Pacific region of Melanesia, for instance, is home to many island and archipelago nations threatened heavily by climate change. As rising sea levels provoke the degradation of historically habitable land, communities are forced into cycles of displacement. Vulnerable populations fleeing conflict zones are also subject to processes of forced migration and assimilation. In many cases, those most affected by crises are also members of minority cultures. WHY SHOULD WE PREVENT LANGUAGE LOSS? When a community loses their language, bonds to their heritage are severed and the foundation of cultural identity is weakened. In fact, studies have shown that language loss is a strong factor in social alienation, leading to higher rates of underperformance in schools, depression, and even suicide. Maintaining our linguistic diversity, then, is a question of social justice, as well as economic development. It’s also a question of research for the sciences and humanities; when a community loses their language, humanity loses generations of knowledge embodied in art, literature, and oral tradition. For instance, by comparing languages from North America to their Siberian counterparts, linguists were able to find evidence of the Bering Strait migration. Working closely with residents of southern Vanuatu, botanists continue to learn about biodiversity from the knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of local languages. When we talk about stopping language loss, we're not worrying about dictionary sales or stocking a museum for posterity. We’re talking about preventing the collapse of human communities and the atrophy of culture. As we have seen, it's impossible to grapple with the collapse of linguistic diversity without also engaging global struggles for human rights; for environmental, economic, and racial justice. OUR PROJECTS: LANGUAGE PRESERVATION Wikitongues collects video oral histories from each of the world's more than 7,000 language communities, preserving our common cultural heritage and amplifying stories from around the world. We publish our videos under creative commons licenses to facilitate free educational use and raise awareness about the vast sum of human experience. To date, we have recorded more than 700 in over 350 unique languages, or roughly 5% of every language in the world. On the ground, our work empowers people to share their languages with everyone, making linguistic preservation easier than ever. Our volunteers work directly with cultural activists, arming them with the basics of oral history production, video captioning, and more, so that they may self-initiate early stage linguistic documentation in their communities. This is a crucial component of the movement to defend linguistic diversity, because studies have shown that language preservation and reclamation are most effectively accomplished on the grassroots level. Wikitongues volunteers are present in more than 60 countries on every continent, and as such, our documentation activities are far-reaching. We also coordinate specific projects for greater measurable impact. In Indonesia, for instance, we have partnered with Polyglot Indonesia, a national network of volunteers dedicated to raising awareness about linguistic diversity in their country — which, with more than 700 indigenous languages, is among the world’s most linguistically diverse, second only to Papua New Guinea. With them, we have coordinated grassroots linguistic documentation in Borneo and identified communities whose languages have yet to be formally researched. In the United States, we have partnered with the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana to record hours of in-depth oral history data. In Liberia, we are working with local nonprofit volunteers to reach communities with low quality internet access, so that they too can participate in Wikitongues. Through these targeted partnerships, we are able to test new models for grassroots engagement, to be replicated elsewhere. OUR PROJECTS: LANGUAGE TOOLS Language preservation movements must be led by the communities experiencing language loss, not outside organizations. That's why in addition to collecting content in every language, we're developing free and open source technology to make it easy for language students, educators, and activists to produce their own linguistic documentation for the benefit of their communities. Our first such tool, Poly, streamlines the process of creating and sharing word lists between any two languages. Speakers of languages without a written standard, including the world's more than 200 sign languages, are supported by native video functionality.