How technology helps and harms endangered languages

Technology is accelerating the rate of language disappearance, even while it offers the hope of preserving those that are endangered or extinct. 

A new crowd-sourcing platform aims to preserve the sound of Romeyka, an endangered relation to Greek considered a "linguistic goldmine and a living bridge to the ancient world", said Phys.org. Romeyka is thought to have only "a couple of thousand native speakers" in Turkey – mostly aged over 65 – and no writing system. Professor Ioanna Sitaridou of the University of Cambridge is inviting Romeyka-speakers to upload audio recordings of the language, as part of the UN's International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-32) initiative.

But a big danger for many languages is the "shift into the digital age", said Fortune. As humans increasingly communicate online, languages that aren't supported by dominant platforms are likely to be forgotten. A language is lost every three to four months – the "fastest rate in recorded history", said Forbes, accelerated by the spread of internet English as a "lingua franca of our technical age". 

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

How does technology threaten languages?

Almost half of the world's 7,000 spoken languages are under the threat of extinction, according to the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Several times every year, the last speaker of a language dies, with no new speakers to take their place. One indigenous language dies every two weeks, according to the United Nations.

The technology sector can help preserve endangered languages – but as the pace of development accelerates, so does the threat. About 97% of global languages are characterised as "digitally disadvantaged", said The Newsroom. 

Phones and computers predominantly built in the US use the English language and Roman alphabet – but if another writing system does not fit that model, "those communities have been placed at a major disadvantage", according to Stanford University professor Tom Mullaney, who specialises in East Asian languages. 

People "get used to making English the language they turn to first", said Karthik Chidambaram, a native Tamil speaker, writing for Fortune. Speakers of Tamil, which has 247 characters, "often type in English characters" to transliterate.

For millions of speakers of languages that lack digital texts and fonts, "much of modern life is off limits", said The Newsroom. Many languages have scripts that are not part of the Unicode standard for digital text and characters. Therefore, artificial intelligence tools, which are trained on digital text, cannot read them. Meanwhile, vast swathes of social media are dominated by American English.

The hyperconnected digital world "threatens to hasten the extinction of many languages".

One "particularly concerning" study published in 2013 predicted that "less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm", said Chidambaram. It warned of "a massive die-off caused by the digital divide".

How can technology help?

This month, Living Tongues teamed up with audio company Shure for a campaign, "No Voice Left Behind", using its new direct-to-phone MoveMic – a wireless clip-on mic aimed at TikTok creators – to record endangered languages in some of the more remote areas in the world.

The mics are "compact, discreet and easy to use, meaning people can vocalise naturally without distraction," Dr Luke Horo, senior researcher in phonetics at Living Tongues, told Forbes. The rechargeable battery can also be topped up with a power bank or a solar panel.

The institute also maintains a "Living Dictionaries" platform – a "community-driven repository for people who are creating online reference sources for their language", said Forbes. It can operate as a bank for languages close to extinction, or those that have already disappeared. 

Chidambaram is leading a company called DCKAP, one of several aiming to build keyboards that would allow people to type in Tamil, rather than transliterate with English characters. "We take inspiration from designers who created a solution for the Chinese language," Chidambaram wrote for Fortune. 

Mullaney, meanwhile, leads a new project called SILICON (Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media), which also aims to add more languages to the Unicode standard. The goal, said SILICON co-founder Dr Kathryn Starkey, professor of German and medieval studies, is to "help level the playing field for languages beyond English". 

"These languages have deep historical, cultural, social relevance and value," Mullaney said. "The wisdom and experience that would be lost if humanity doesn't get this right is incalculable."