When we talk about endangered languages, the conversation almost always centres on spoken words — the fading voices of elderly speakers, the unwritten grammars of remote communities, the oral traditions that die when the last fluent speaker passes. But there is a parallel crisis unfolding in silence: the world’s sign languages are disappearing too, and…
In a small classroom on the Big Island of Hawai’i, a three-year-old greets her teacher entirely in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi — the Hawaiian language. Her parents don’t speak it. Her grandparents don’t speak it. But she does, because she attends a Pūnana Leo, a “language nest” where Hawaiian isn’t a subject to be studied but the…
Somewhere in the world, a language is falling silent. Not with a dramatic last word or a ceremonial farewell, but quietly — in the gap between an elderly grandmother who dreams in her mother tongue and grandchildren who reply in the national language. According to current estimates, one language disappears approximately every two weeks. At…
A language dies roughly every two weeks. With nearly half of the world’s 7,000 languages at risk of vanishing within a generation, linguists and technologists are locked in an unprecedented race against time. But a new ally has emerged: artificial intelligence. From New Zealand to the American Midwest, AI-powered tools are opening pathways to document,…