One of the most precious plus a culture has is its speech . There are rough 7500 discrete languages spoken around the world today , but virtually half of them are at risk of infection of disappearing for goodness . A mode to preserve go speech communication is to hike up their visibility — which , thanks to the educational app Duolingo , is now happening with Navajo and Hawaiian , TIMEreports .
As of October 8,Indigenous People ’s Day , Duolingo now offer courses in the two languages . Mostlanguagestaught through the free app ’s bite - sized lessons — like English , Spanish , and Chinese — are wide spoken around the human beings . A few years , ago Duolingo began experiment with using its technical school to share the world ’s less popular terminology with more speakers . When it launched its Irish language track in 2014 , there were roughly 100,000 native Irish speakers on Earth ; around 4 million people have been let out to the language through the app since then .
For its two belated spoken language offering , Duolingo take to focalise on indigenous languages that have been fight to the brink of extinction by settlement . Even though Navajo , orDiné , is one of the more democratic surviving Native American languages , only around 150,000 people talk it today . The Hawaiian speech communication , Ōlelo Hawaiʻi , has about1000 native speakersand 8000 citizenry who talk and understand it fluently . Both linguistic communication were banned in American school in recent hundred , which greatly lend to their declension .
Duolingo ’s unexampled project is only one example of how technology is being used to uphold and revive ancient speech . In 2013 , Aili Keskitalo , President of the United States of the Sami Parliament in Norway , launched asocial media campaignencouraging citizenry to share messages in Sami using hashtags like # speaksamitome ; a few years ago , primaeval artist Angelina Joshua produced a video game around theMarra languagecalledMy Grandmother ’s Lingo .
[ h / tTIME ]
