Can AI help us save endangered languages?

人工智能能否帮助我们拯救濒危语言?

What in the World

2026-06-09

9 分钟
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Around half of the world’s languages are in danger of disappearing, according to UNESCO. Languages often become endangered when parents stop talking in them to their children, when schools no longer offer them on the curriculum - or when governments don’t recognise them as official languages that need to be protected. Campaigners are calling for more efforts to preserve them - and the history, heritage and culture they carry - and they’re using an unlikely tool: AI. But there are concerns that artificial intelligence could actually create more language inequality, because it’s mainly trained on a handful of dominant languages. So, could AI stop endangered languages from going extinct? Or will it speed up their demise? Journalist and author Sophia Smith Galer joins us to explain how languages become endangered, how AI is being used to combat this and the risks of using the technology to preserve languages. And we hear from Ivory Yang in the US, who built an AI tool to help preserve her grandmother’s endangered language, Nüshu. Instagram: @bbcwhatintheworld Email: whatintheworld@bbc.co.uk WhatsApp: +44 330 12 33 22 6 Presenter: Hannah Gelbart Producers: Chelsea Coates and William Lee Adams Video producer: Baldeep Chahal Editor: Verity Wilde
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  • Around the world, languages are disappearing, and when they go, it's not just the words you lose.

  • You can lose stories, songs, history, ways of seeing the world.

  • And around half of the world's languages are now endangered.