Digital Dictionaries Help Save Vanishing Languages

There are some 7,000 languages spoken in the world, and half of them could be gone by 2100. To rescue these languages, two linguists decided to use a combination of digital recording technology and the Internet.
K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson are compiling what they call "talking dictionaries." Some of the languages they recorded have never been documented before. In 2010, they made the first recordings of Koro, for example, a language spoken by only a few hundred people in northeastern India.
The dictionaries so far contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages, with over 24,000 audio recordings of native speakers pronouncing words and sentences.
Some of the work is available online. In one case, a community in Papua New Guinea that speaks a language called Matukar Panau, with only 600 speakers, asked that the language be put on the Internet even though it was only in the last two years that their village received electricity. Their talking dictionary can be seen here.

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