We live in a pivotal time for endangered language documentation and revitalization. There are over 3,000 threatened languages in the world, many of which may disappear by 2100, or sooner. While it is natural for languages to come and go over time, we are currently living through a period of steep decline in linguistic diversity. Recent studies indicate that one language goes extinct every 3.5 months. Several times every year, the last speaker of a language passes away, and there is no new generation of speakers to take their place.

Once a language is gone, it is very difficult to bring it back, although it’s not impossible. Language preservation, reconstruction, and revival can all be accomplished by studying credible and current information such as community websites, legacy materials and recorded resources. Wikipedia, one of the world’s most popular websites, is the perfect place to aggregate and highlight such information for the public because it is freely accessible, and easy to update with new research findings.

People learning about their heritage languages, scholars, and cultural stakeholders need access to centralized, up-to-date and credible resources with information about endangered languages. Wikipedia is now one of the first places where people go to obtain online information about endangered languages. Wikipedia often leads researchers and community activists to connect with other up-to-date and credible websites such as Glottolog and Endangered Languages Catalog (ELCat), and other sites, where they can find even more detailed scientific information. 

Some Wikipedia pages on endangered languages such as Atikamekw are very well-developed and signal robust community collaboration and online presence. However, most endangered language pages on Wikipedia lack basic features such as population and regional information, history of the language, grammatical features, relevant cultural information about the speech communities who identify with these languages, as well as references that point to current publications and other existing resources approved and used by speech communities.

Our idea is to improve the quality, credibility and depth of roughly 250 Wikipedia entries for endangered languages by providing the latest research findings, grammatical information and links to relevant cultural and scientific information about these languages. This focus will drastically improve the quality and credibility of the pages and serve researchers and stakeholders around the globe who are eager to access this knowledge. Our goal is to train interns to improve Wikipedia entries in 2020. Eventually, our goal would be to scale and expand this program to improve and make contributions to all 3,000+ pages for endangered languages on Wikipedia.

So far, we have undertaken the editing of over 120 Wikipedia language page entries to add information about Talking Dictionaries, publications as well as other useful community resources.

Want to contribute? Write to Program Director Anna Luisa Daigneault at: annaluisa@livingtongues.org