The world speaks about 6909 languages. How many of those we know about? And we will probably not get to even know about the people that speak those languages as half of those languages are dying in a century's time. At least one language is dying in every second week. But what do we really lose when we lose a language?
Think about the indigenous culture, and cuisine, and weaving techniques, the unique soothing music, the dance forms, and many more that have only been ascribed in a particular language—they are too valuable to lose. We can create a lot with Artificial Intelligence, but who does not want to play a digital game or even a board game that is recreated from an indigenous game-play? It’s a great benefit to live in an era that has such powerful digital tools to document and grow languages for many generations that are yet to come. This is probably the right time to think how we can take the advantage of openness—that contains the open source software, the open educational resource, the open processes and communities, and a diverse range of outcomes in open standards—to transform the state of many endangered languages.
This course is designed to keep in mind people that have no or very less experience in making digital documentations of native languages.