This article is in partnership with Day Translations.

The number of remaining endangered languages will shrink further and further in time if we don’t act to protect them and continue studying, learning and sharing them with the wider world.

Just recently (April 2025) the fashion magazine Vogue featured endangered languages in its issue: when even a publication that is mostly unrelated to the world of languages decides to talk about this topic, then it means that the awareness of the problem has to reach all levels of society. Of course, fashion is aspirational and only a few people can afford designer clothes, but as individuals we are all influenced by fashion trends, whether we like it or not. Even deciding to only wear second hand clothes is a fashion choice.

Back to the topic of endangered languages, Vogue interviewed linguists including specialists in Native American languages including members of the Algonquian Language Revitalization Project.

The article talks about a native American linguist from the Shinnecock Indian Nation and the tradition of playing games as a fun and engaging way to keep languages alive.

The process to ensure endangered languages will continue to be spoken in the future is to talk to and interview Native American chiefs, for example, and document every conversation accurately. Alongside asking elders in a community about their memories and stories, the process involves reconstruction and tracing back different traditions embedded in the community.

Research Studies About Endangered Languages

Studies have shown that preserving endangered languages is key to ensure there is diversification and cultural awareness of multiple marginalised groups that share a common idiom.

In 2021 an article from the International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research found that understanding and protecting local languages and dialects is essential to maintain diversity, particularly looking at what languages indigenous communities in the Philippines speak that are at risk of extinction.

The Harvard International Review talked about indigenous languages, referring for example to the 1,300 different indigenous languages spoken in Papua New Guinea and their unique characteristics, such as using sounds that mimick those made by birds.

Quoting from the Endangered Language Fund, the extinction of these languages would be a “cultural disaster” because we would lose different perspectives of the world, such as the respect for nature which is essential in many indigenous groups. It is also important to keep these languages alive to prevent linguistic homogeneity driven by globalisation and the predominant use of the English language as well as of Spanish and Chinese.

The main obstacles to the process of language preservation are mostly the lack of funding and the lack of public awareness. When funding is available the positive impact is huge: for example, government-funded programmes in Wales in the UK and in Arizona in the United States have created immersion programmes in schools which resulted in a significant uptake in languages that risk extinction.

However, simple strategies such as engaging people through games to make them more interested in endangered languages can make a difference even when funding is inappropriate.

Photo by Ling App on Unsplash