According to the statistics shared by UNESCO, at least 43% of the total languages that are estimated as being spoken across the world are in danger of extinction. Moreover, many languages around the world have less than 1,000 speakers now. Linguists (语言学家) and researchers believe that by the end of the century, at least half of the world' s languages will have died. This is troublesome, given that cultural identity and languages go hand in hand.
Language activists and people who speak these endangered languages are fighting back tooth and nail. Scientists believe that digitalization might be our only hope to preserve some of these quickly disappearing languages in the online world.
For instance, Oxford University Press launched Oxford Global Languages a few years ago. It is an initiative that boosts "digitally underrepresented" languages. They are focused on promoting languages that might have close to a million speakers worldwide, yet have little or no online presence. Therefore, they have been creating digital dictionaries as a fundamental building block to help preserve them.
There have been countless other projects like this with the same aim. Another is the Rosetta Project, which aims to create a handheld digital library that will carry more than 1,500 languages. It will be appropriately sized to fit nicely into our hands, and will come with around 13,000 pages of information. It will also have a high life expectancy of anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 years. Initiatives like these have as their primary objective to ensure the preservation of local languages long after their speakers have died.
Countless languages are dying every day, and they will continue toperishas the remaining speakers die. Of course, we cannot merely rely on digitization to deal with worldwide languages loss. However, it is a step in the right direction. These digital tools offer endangered languages man opportunity to bounce back and survive. .
