Story at a glance
- Some 3,000 languages around the world are in danger of extinction.
- Many of them are seldom or never online, hastening their decline.
- But new courses and tools are coming to the rescue and may help keep many of these languages alive.
- Hawaiian, Navajo and Irish are among the treasured languages that are being saved.
The future of the world’s nearly 3,000 endangered languages may depend on their relationship to the internet. An analysis in 2013 by mathematical linguist András Kornai found that only a few hundred languages are actively used online, and the future looks bleak for those that missed the boat. But some companies are taking action with digital tools to keep endangered languages alive.
The game-based language education platform Duolingo originally hosted only five language courses, but in 2014 began offering Irish after a heartfelt request from then-high school student Noah Higgs, James Griffiths reports for CNN Business.
Irish is spoken by about 1.2 million people worldwide and is classified as a threatened language; for comparison, there are more than 1 billion English speakers in the world. Languages are endangered when they may no longer be spoken within a century.
Duolingo now offers more than 30 languages, including courses in Hawaiian and Navajo that launched on the platform in 2018.
“It’s just something we feel like we have to do,” Duolingo’s Myra Awodey, who led work on the Hawaiian and Navajo projects, told Katy Steinmetz at Time magazine in 2018.
Although the courses may not generate much revenue, the company is in a unique position “not only to preserve dying languages but make them something that’s spreading,” she says.
Active online communities that use endangered languages will be key for their long-term survival. Kornai’s 2013 analysis highlights a striking example from Norway, where two varieties of Norwegian, Bokmål and Nynorsk, are spoken. Although Bokmål is spoken by about 85 to 90 percent of the Norwegian population, it overwhelms Nynorsk online.
“The Norwegian population has already voted with their blogs and tweets to take only Bokmål with them to the digital age,” Kornai told The Washington Post. Duolingo’s Norwegian course is in Bokmål.
Not all endangered languages face the same challenges.
“Hawaiian and Irish are First World languages, with excellent chances of survival. … They are precisely the ones that benefit from better technologies, things like Duolingo,” Kornai says by email. For example, there are active Irish- and Hawaiian-language Wikipedias, which he points out as indicators of the languages’ vitality on the internet.
Languages “with a larger population base but located in a poor part of the world, for example Tulu,” — a language spoken by about 1.7 million people in Karnataka, India — and those spoken only in small communities, of which there are thousands, are more in peril, he says.
One language-learning startup, Tribalingual, offers courses in languages such as Ainu and Gangte, spoken in small communities of Japan and India respectively. Initiatives such as Ethnologue and the Endangered Languages Project are gathering data and resources about minority languages to catalogue online, and the National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages project supports research.
To Kornai, these projects are not enough.
“These are really fighting a fire by spoonfuls of water,” he says.
But for communities whose languages are seeing revitalization with new technology, the future is looking brighter.
Online language learning is just one facet of a revival for the Hawaiian language, which was sparked by a radio broadcast more than 40 years ago, Sara Kehaulani Goo reports at NPR. And Duolingo’s Irish course now has nearly 940,000 active weekly users. The team was even commended by Irish President Michael Higgins in 2016 for their service to preserving the language.
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