Recent reports suggest that less than 5 percent of the world’s languages are online–and that for the other 95%, the Internet can be a path to extinction or revitalization. Viki, a popular video streaming site with primetime TV shows and movies from around the world, is hoping to reverse that trend with the help of its 33 million viewers. Viewers on Viki, a play on the words video and wiki, also happen to write or “crowdsource” the subtitles for the shows they watch.

Today, the company announced that it is launching an Endangered and Emerging Languages Program in partnership with Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Viki, a subsidiary of Rakuten, and Living Tongues will work to document endangered languages and assist communities with maintaining and revitalizing knowledge of their native tongues, like Quechua in Peru, Basque on the French-Spain border, or Cornish in the United Kingdom.

“Technology alone does not doom or save languages. But pride in a language, and willingness to creatively expand its use through technologies like Viki, can certainly help save it,” said Dr. K. David Harrison, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College and Director of Research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.

Linguists, scholars, technologists, students, and other members of the Viki community are already using the Viki platform to help make shows available in languages on the brink of extinction. To date, shows on Viki–including Korean dramas, Japanese anime, Bollywood and US films–have been subtitled into 29 endangered and threatened and 20 emerging languages, accounting for nearly 25 percent of the 200 languages available on the site.

“In the past two years, we’ve been contacted by nearly a dozen organizations whose mission is to preserve their languages, and by extension, their rich cultural histories. They wanted us to add their language to our subtitles list so that they could help the younger generation practice and learn,” said Razmig Hovaghimian, Viki CEO and co-founder. “We want to help ensure that these languages are not forgotten or lost, but live on in a tradition that has carried them for generations–through storytelling.”

Read the full article in National Geographic’s News Watch here: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/09/16/crowdsourcing-subtitles-for-endangered-languages/

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