More than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today, and 40 percent of those are endangered. They risk being irretrievably lost unless we make concerted efforts to preserve them. Such a loss can profoundly impact entire cultures, erasing unique identities and rich heritages.
World Endangered Writing Day commemorates the importance of celebrating the languages around us while also working to ensure that scripts around the world, and the languages they represent, will not be forgotten.
Why is preserving endangered languages so important?
The past century of globalization has streamlined many traditions and processes around the world that were previously unique. It is a significant reason why, in the last 125 years, English has gone from being the third-most spoken language globally to being at the top. But this is not an article about English. Instead, it is about languages increasingly threatened by increasing uniformization.
A language is more than just words. It represents the lives of the people who speak and write it. The connotations, linguistic history, and emotions associated with the words are all-important for those who use and identify with the language.
In the words of Professor Megan Davis, Chair of the United Nations Forum on Indigenous Issues, saving indigenous languages is “crucial to ensure the protection of the cultural identity and dignity of indigenous peoples and safeguard their traditional heritage.”
It’s Important for Everyone
Three distinct reasons stand out here:
- Cultural Heritage. Languages build a connection to a culture’s history and ancestry. Preserving a language at risk of extinction means preserving its traditions, stories, and wisdom.
- Linguistic Diversity. A broad array of languages means a diversity of perspectives. It also invites a broadened dialogue thanks to greater richness in thought, literature, and expression.
- Social Inclusion. Preserving an endangered language promotes understanding and tolerance of the people who speak it, thus offering a voice to communities that might otherwise be marginalized.
Think about it in the context of untranslatable words. We all share a basic understanding of modern life. But words like the German Feierabend, the Danish Hygge, and the Urdu Goya require entire sentences to explain. Similarly, indigenous and endangered languages broaden our perspectives on how different cultures experience the world around them.
However, letting a language slip away is remarkably easy. Put simply, promoting one’s own language will always be the more convenient choice. That convenience helps explain a striking gap.
UNESCO estimates that at least half the world’s population lives daily in two or more languages. The most recent US Census release on language use tells a different story, however. It found that nearly four in five Americans aged five and over speak only English at home.
The same release carries a quieter finding. Speakers of Native North American languages, including Navajo and Central Yupik, declined by 6% over eight years. Consequently, language endangerment is not a distant story for English-speaking countries either.
The Role of Native Scripts and Alphabets in Cultural Heritage
The written word has an undeniable reach. An alphabet gives language a visible form, so ideas can travel intact across distance and time. Indeed, a strong case can be made that writing is the most far-reaching technology humans have ever built. Almost every modern communication still rests on it.
Writing does more than express. It formalizes expression, so knowledge can be shared in lasting ways. We could deliver this article as a talk or a private conversation. By writing it down, however, we send it across a far wider web of readers, now and in the future.
That is the core value of native scripts and alphabets. Without them, the histories of many peoples become almost impossible to record. Much knowledge simply would not have survived as oral history alone. Only through the written word do later generations meet the same lessons and teachings as those who came before.
Script is also a form of self-expression. Depending on the culture, letters carry mystical meanings, connect to physical rituals, or shift in meaning according to how they are drawn. Above all, they represent cultures determined to express themselves and pass their teachings on. Losing that piece of a culture is devastating, while preserving it is well worth the effort.
A Case Study of an Endangered Language
The world is home to more than 7,000 languages, 6,000 of which are considered indigenous. One of them loses its last speaker every week and effectively goes extinct. One linguist shared a personal experience with one such example. The language in this case was Naati, an indigenous language spoken by only one person on the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Its last speaker was fluent in plenty of the local dialects; his fear, however, revolved around the cultural implications of losing his forebearers’ language.
Because he was the last speaker, much of that knowledge has already been lost. Also, we know of many other examples where the loss of a language led to forced cultural assimilation into its larger counterpart. The same linguist studying Naati also recounted Lulamogi, a Ugandan dialect. When the language was lost, it impacted how local tribes could trap and eat white ants. Without the language to describe the various methods used by their ancestors, they simply began to lose their effectiveness in the age-old practice.
AI, Digital Data, and the Languages Left Out
The pressure on endangered languages now has a digital dimension. Researchers have warned in PLOS ONE that fewer than 5% of the world’s languages can make the climb into the digital realm. Large language models have sharpened that divide, because they learn mostly from text, and most languages have very little text online. A language can therefore stay healthy in daily speech and still be nearly invisible to the technology its speakers use every day.
The more interesting story, however, is now happening in speech. Many endangered languages are primarily oral, so a text-first view of AI wrote them off from the start. Speech recognition and speech synthesis work from recorded audio instead, which changes the economics of documentation entirely. Hours of conversation with an elder can become searchable, usable language data without a written corpus ever existing.
That is why Riehl hauled recording equipment across Malekula. Furthermore, it is why recording work like hers grows more valuable every year.
Institutions are moving with the technology. UNESCO now convenes language communities and technology builders through its Language Technologies for All program. Speech corpora and script digitization sit high on that agenda.
Every organization building or buying these systems also decides which languages get represented and which do not. That is one reason our own AI consulting work treats human linguistic judgment as a requirement rather than an optional extra.
What It Takes to Preserve an Endangered Language
The world is full of stories like the above. Fortunately, no one is powerless in the quest to preserve as many endangered languages and alphabets as possible. Participating in the World Endangered Writing Day is a great start. So are passion projects like the effort to dub Star Wars movies in Navajo dialects.
But the opportunities go much further. Colleges and universities are now undertaking concerted efforts to preserve languages. The United Nations has created a special council with the same goal. Everyone can do their part by seeking out, learning, and using languages that might otherwise be at risk of extinction.
Where We Stand
Ultimately, this comes down to a regard for language and an understanding of what it holds. Treating a language as words on a page is always tempting. In our industry, though, we work every day with the meanings and cultural weight sitting underneath those words. Global brands have trusted us with their most critical content for almost three decades.
That experience shapes how we think about linguistic diversity. Preserving endangered languages is not our commercial business. Even so, we value the nuance each language carries, and we support the work of keeping languages and scripts alive. If you are weighing how your own multilingual content serves the communities who read it, we would be glad to talk it through.
You can also join the effort directly. World Endangered Writing Day takes place every January 23, and its virtual events are open to anyone who wants to attend.
