Google Wishes to Shield Endangered Languages from Extinction Erik Pineda - IBTimes.com
go to original July 18, 2012

The Endangered Languages Project is a website for people to find and share the most up-to-date and comprehensive information about the over 3,000 endangered languages of the world. Continue exploring at www.endangeredlanguages.com

More than 3000 languages currently in use around the world are projected to vanish before the turn of the century, a spectre that Google said its aims to prevent from happening by launching its new culture-protection project.

The Internet giant is stepping in through the establishment of an online information exchange platform that hopefully would provide new lease in life to languages and local vernaculars that anthropologists deemed are in danger of extinction.

Google christened the web forum as endangeredlanguages.com, where visitors from all corners of the world will be able to post informative materials about their spoken languages.

The site should spark healthy exchanges of ideas and information that in the long-term could help preserve dialects which in the present context could soon be eliminated by key nations' prevailing languages.

Of particular concerns to anthropologists were languages spoken by small groups of people in specific countries or of the aborigines situated in Australia, Mexico and the United States.

In Australia alone, some 200 hundred languages could never be heard again after a hundred years, Google said, but with the existence of a Web site where users can access and share texts, videos, photos and audio files of archaic but still spoken languages, they may survive the onslaught of the modern world.

The world we know today, experts said, is being shrunk by technological breakthroughs that eventually render obsolete things that cannot cope with the necessities of modern living.

The same necessity considerations would be the main killer of mankind's treasured past, language including, according to anthropologist Francisco Barriga.

"Generally languages that are threatened are being abandoned by their own speakers as they are not seen as positive and speakers instead opt for another language seen as more economically or socially advantageous," Mr Barriga was reported by the Australian Associated Press (AAP) as saying.

But relevance of any specific local languages in the modern settings, which is what the new Google platform is set to achieve, could very well convince users to take effective measures in perpetuating the manner of communication that their forefathers have bestowed on them, he added.

Google Mexico would be the epicentre of the new initiative and according to Miguel Alba, the company's country marketing chief, the project will attempt to keep the fire burning on thousands of local languages that speakers may find necessary to brush aside in favour of global languages that give them tickets for advancement.

"(The project) is an open, on-line platform where anybody can get on and start sharing materials in those languages which are in danger of being lost," Agence France Presse (AFP) reported Mr Alba as saying in a statement.

He added that about half of the languages we use today may not keep up with the modern times.

Hopefully, with the platform provided by Google, many would be preserved and carried over to next hundred years, the Google official added.

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