The topic of saving endangered languages is buzzing once again, this time in the form of a documentary. The Linguists, a documentary airing Thursday on PBS, follows David Harrison and Greg Anderson in their “amazing language race” to document endangered languages in far away corners of the planet such as Siberia, Bolivia and India. The linguists, Harrison and Anderson, speak 25 languages combined, which is amazing in itself. Read more about The Linguists from NPR.

Closer to home, companies and individuals within our country have tackled the mission of recording and reviving indigenous languages using current technology. In this excerpt from a February 14, 2009 press release: Using Computers to Learn and Preserve Indigenous Languages, Byki’s parent company, Transparent Language, explains how it provided its software tools and training free of charge to the nonprofit organization Grassroots Educational Multimedia (GEM), founded by Mary Hermes and her husband Kevin. The organization’s mission lies in developing curriculum materials especially designed to teach Ojibwe and other First Nation languages. Ojibwe is currently the third most widely taught indigenous language in North America after Navajo and Cherokee.

Transparent Language, which contracts with hundreds of linguists and native speakers around the world, has always been committed to adding languages to the Byki roster, regardless of how remote or active the language may be. Our CEO Michael Quinlan puts it this way: “We live in an age of global interaction. No language is so small that no one needs to learn it. If we could, we would provide software for all 4,000 languages in the world.”

Byki has added remote languages such as Altai, Tuvan, Buriat and Tajiki to our offerings as a testament to our love of language learning. For example, according to Wikipedia, Altai, which is the official language of Altai Republic in Russia, had 67,900 people speakers in 2002. These 4 languages, and 67 others are available in Byki Express 4.0 as a free language software download.