As someone with a fascination for languages, the new project that Google Earth launched, called Celebrating Indigenous Languages, is a treat. It allows one to listen to various indigenous languages being spoken in different parts of the world.
The project, called Celebrating Indigenous Languages, is designed to honour the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages. For Indigenous people, language is a lifeline to culture.
"It's my identity. It's who I am as a person," said Dolores Greyeyes Sand, a Plains Cree language teacher from Saskatchewan who contributed to the project.
There are thousands of languages in the world but most of them are on the verge of extinction. As globalization continues to pervade, we will see dwindling numbers of speakers of these indigenous languages until such point that there will be nobody left who can speak the language and it will be lost.
Being able to document a language and teach it to others is one way of preserving, not only the language, but also the culture and identity of its people. Hopefully, with various projects like Celebrating Indigenous Languages, we might keep these languages alive for generations to come.
(Image credit: Google)