Thirty-five percent of the world’s 7,000 languages have less than 50,000 speakers; we are in danger of losing these languages if we don’t act to preserve them. Working with Google.org and the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, we built a web tool that brings together the world’s knowledge on this topic to better highlight the jeopardy facing over 3,000 languages in the years to come. If you have some translated text, a voice recorder or a camera, you can also upload pieces of these languages through our simple upload feature, preserving the language before it’s too late. Doing the hard technological work to make it easy to take action: this is what Vizzuality does.
The main part of the website is an intuitive, interactive map that allows users to explore languages by location, level of threat or number of speakers.
We used Django and a number of techniques to build a high performance front-end able deal with the large audience.
Latest activity and other social features recognise and promote user contributions to documentation.
Michelle Maltais, Los Angeles Times
Global Forest Watch.
