The Rosetta Project and PanLex Project at The Long Now Foundation are excited to announce that we are participating in a new initiative called the Endangered Languages Project, which is backed by the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity.
As member organization of the Alliance, we will be providing support for the Project, which aims to:
– accelerate, strengthen, and catalyze efforts around endangered language documentation,
– support communities engaged in protecting or revitalizing their languages, and
– raise awareness about ways to address threats to endangered languages.
Through the Endangered Languages Project, endangered language communities and scholars are able to contribute their own materials by uploading language documentation via Google tools such as Google Docs and YouTube. Alliance members will help maintain the project as an open space so that any user can find, share, and discuss the most comprehensive and up to date information and primary data on endangered languages.
As part of our contribution, the PanLex project has offered to make accessible its compilation of a half-billion pairwise translations among 17 million lexemes in 6,000 languages. Our hope is that this data can be made available through the Endangered Languages Project to promote collaboration with researchers and enable more than a trillion additional inferred lexical translations.
