Deliverable secrets

Will Google's 'Endangered Languages Project' hold off the inevitable?

Google has embarked on documenting about 3,500 languages likely to disappear within a century. Of the world's approximately 7,000 languages, this half comprises languages "at risk, endangered, severely endangered and [of] vitality unknown". The Endangered Languages Project website was launched last Thursday, coinciding with Canada's National Aboriginal Day, inviting experts to collaborate on recording, sharing and accessing threatened languages using the gamut of Google's tools, such as Google Maps, Google Groups and YouTube. Google collaborated with universities and linguistic interest groups to launch the project.

At the heart of this ambitious venture may lie the desperation of the clock ticking away, but the question of what exactly is lost every time a language dies trumps the question of why one endangered language dies while another gets a reprieve. Therefore, whether it's Poitevin, spoken in central France, or Aka (Koro on the site) in Arunachal Pradesh, this is an angelic desperation. If it were not for Cmiique Iitom, spoken by the indigenous Seri in Mexico, for instance, several indispensable tools to mitigate the damage to the world's biodiversity would never have been discovered. Every time a language dies, it takes with it a repository of knowledge — medicinal, botanical, scientific, existential — to say the least.

Globalisation and its accompanying disappearance of cultural boundaries has undoubtedly hastened the process of linguistic acculturation. However, this is also an easy blame to lay. Languages have been dying since they began to be spoken. And whatever the cause, at the end, there's usually the Lawrentian lament of "The undeliverable secret,/ Dead with a dead race and a dead speech...." If Google muted that lament for its 3,054 languages, by putting information about them at one instantly accessible location, it would do a lot of good.

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