Google's Endangered Languages Project

 Total no of Languages of the world - Languages on the verge of extinction - Google's Endangered Languages Project - a Humanitarian Project to save languages under threat of extinction.

Very few of us probably know how many languages are spoken in the world today. It is very difficult to count even, because it is not possible to access all the languages of the world by any certain organization. 
Besides, there are chances of controversies regarding which is merely a dialect and which is a complete language. However, according to ethnologue.com there are 6,809 languages in the world today. According

to the linguistic experts half of these languages will be extinct by the end of this century. Yes, extinct! And this is happening at a very rapid pace. The extinction of a language is comparable to the extinction of a species. The knowledge and information gathered in that language through several generations will be lost forever. Do you disagree? I am giving an example. On 26^th December 2004 there was a tsunami in the coastal areas of India and some other countries of Indian Ocean. Around 2,30,000 people were killed in 14 countries. Andaman and Nicobar islands of India were severely affected but surprisingly the aboriginals of Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Onge, Jarawa, Sentinel etc.) were not affected by the tsunami. These aboriginals have acquired knowledge through generation after generation to read the phenomena of nature and act accordingly, and this knowledge is stored in their languages. Had these languages been abolished the information and knowledge stored in these languages will also be lost.

Recently Google has taken a humanitarian project by the name “The Endangered Languages Project”  to save the languages under threat of extinction. This project “is an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat.”Google uses its technologies and resources to help “the organizations and individuals working to confront language endangerment by documenting, preserving and teaching them.”

The website is 

http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/