Saving Endangered Languages
Of about 7,800 languages in Glottolog, over 4,000 are threatened, shifting, moribund or nearly extinct, and a quarter have only a wordlist or less.
Open in the interactive tree →A language is lost when children stop learning it, usually because of schooling, migration, stigma and the pull of a few large languages. Recording and describing a language takes years of work with its speakers, and a recording does not keep the language alive. The UN declared 2022-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, with a mid-term review in 2027.
As of October 2026
Glottolog 5.3 lists 7,839 languages, of which 984 are extinct, 1,565 threatened, 1,799 shifting, 421 moribund and 300 nearly extinct; 1,911 (24%) have a wordlist or less. Ethnologue's 28th edition (2025) counts over 7,000 living languages. AI helps at the recording end: Te Hiku Media's Māori speech recogniser reaches 92% accuracy (company-reported) and Meta's Omnilingual ASR (November 2025) covers 1,600+ languages, though only 36% of the low-resource ones reach under 10% character error. Communities set rules for their data, as in Te Hiku's Kaitiakitanga Licence.
What is missing
- Recordings and descriptions for the languages that have only a wordlist
- Children learning the language at home and in school
- Community control of data and agreed licences
- Speech and text tools that work from a few hours of data
- Shared, reliable counts of speakers and vitality
Becomes possible once solved
- Children growing up in their heritage language
- Dictionaries, grammars and archives that outlive the last speaker
- Evidence about language drawn from the full range of human languages
Open steps
- Record speakers while they live Medium AI leverageDocument moribund and nearly extinct languages (421 and 300 in Glottolog 5.3) with audio, texts and wordlists before the last speakers die.
- Languages with only a wordlist Medium AI leverage1,911 languages (24% in Glottolog 5.3) have a wordlist or less; grammars and text collections for them need linguists and speakers.
- Children learning the language Low AI leverageTransmission through homes, schools and immersion decides survival; technology cannot replace speakers.
- Tools that work from few hours Medium AI leverageKeyboards, fonts, spell-checkers, speech recognition and translation for languages with little data; Omnilingual ASR adds languages from a few paired examples.
- Agree what 'endangered' means Medium AI leverageCounts differ by method: Glottolog 5.3 lists 4,085 languages as threatened, shifting, moribund or nearly extinct; other catalogues use other scales.
Where AI could help
Medium AI leverage. AI speeds transcription and builds tools for small languages, but speakers, time and community consent decide whether a language survives.
- Speed up transcription and glossing of recordings
- Align audio, text and translations automatically
- Build keyboards, spell-checkers and speech tools from little data
- Estimate speaker numbers and vitality from census and web data
Shown so far
- Te Hiku Media's Māori speech models reach 92% accuracy and have sped up transcription of an archive of about 1,000 hours of native-speaker content (NVIDIA blog, company-reported). source
- Meta's Omnilingual ASR lets users add a language from a few paired audio and text samples, with no retraining; low-resource languages with under ten hours of audio are the weak spot. source
Prerequisites
- Spoken Languageat least ~135,000 years ago?
- Sound Recording1877
- Unicode1991