By bbc.com
Publication Date: 2026-06-09 14:08:00
According to UNESCO, about half of the world’s languages are at risk of extinction. Languages often end up in danger when parents no longer speak them to their children, when schools no longer offer them in the curriculum – or when governments do not recognize them as official languages that need to be protected. Activists are calling for more effort to preserve them – and the history, heritage and culture they carry – and they are using an unlikely tool: AI. However, there are concerns that artificial intelligence could actually lead to more language inequality because it is primarily trained on a handful of dominant languages.
So could AI prevent the extinction of endangered languages? Or will it hasten their demise?
Journalist and author Sophia Smith Galer explains how languages are being endangered, how AI is being used to combat it, and the risks of using technology to preserve languages. And we hear from Ivory Yang from the US, who has developed an AI tool to help…
