Over 40% of the world’s 7,000 languages are at risk of disappearing. Working with Google.org and the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, we built a web tool that brings together the world’s knowledge on this topic to highlight the jeopardy facing over 3000 languages in the coming years.
With every language that dies, we lose an enormous cultural heritage; the understanding of how humans relate to the world around us; scientific, medical and botanical knowledge; and most importantly, we lose the expression of communities’ humor, love and life. In short, we lose the testimony of centuries of life.
Worldwide.
The main part of the website is an intuitive, interactive map that allows users to explore languages by location, threat level or number of speakers.
Performance.
We used Django and several techniques to build a high-performance front end to deal with a large audience.
Personable.
Latest activity and other social features recognise and promote user contributions to documentation.
This platform welcomes feedback from language communities and scholars worldwide to continually update information about the world's most endangered languages, making it a dynamic and evolving resource. If you have some translated text, a voice recorder or a camera, you can also upload pieces of these languages through our simple upload feature, preserving the language before it’s too late. Doing the hard technological work to make it easy to take action is what Vizzuality does.