Wikitongues
Daniel Bogre Udell
Wikitongues is an opensourced documentary project, dedicated to recording the world’s 7,000 languages as fluid vehicles of individual expression. I have been busy creating a thorough body of content by conducting video interviews with a diverse array of speakers, and harnessing the power of social networks to diffuse this content on a global level.1 In doing so, I have been able to build a growing community of followers excited by and engaged with the phenomenon of diversity. As an individual who has traveled from a young age had the privilege of living abroad twice in Spain, I have always been fascinated by diversity, and particularly by its foundational expression, language, which exists at the intersection of the individual and collective; we express ourselves with language, and use it to identify with others. My long-term goal for Wikitongues — documenting every language in the world — is far beyond the scope of a year. Thankfully, the excitement that Wikitongues has generated online has helped facilitate its transition from an individual project to a team effort, driven by the passion of a small but nonetheless open group of students and linguists from four countries. By the end of 2013, I plan to have expanded our collection of languages and our content’s global reach, as well as having implemented an open-sourced website so that anyone interested in our effort can contribute by uploading their own videos. 1 Wikitongues videos have reached 2,000 people from fifty different countries. We currently hail from The United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Spain.