Several years ago the buzz word was “diversity,” referring to multiethnocultural matters. Then it was “biodiversity,” save the whales, gnatcatchers, and legacy apples. Now it’s “linguistic diversity,” so severe a problem that the National Science Foundation granted a million dollars to build the ALL Language Archive, part of the Rosetta Project.

According to Rosetta, “Fifty to ninety percent of the world’s languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation. Much of the work that has been done, especially on smaller languages, remains hidden away in personal research files or poorly preserved in under-funded archives.”

Researchers are creating a “near permanent” archive of 1,000 of the approximately 7,000 languages extant. Plans to preserve and distribute the information are a curious mix of high and low technology: online, a reference book, and a micro-etched (analog images) three-inch nickel disc to be read with a microscope. “Since the encoding is a physical image (no ones or zeros), there is no platform or format dependency, guaranteeing readability despite changes in digital operating systems, applications, compression algorithms, etc.” is the explanation offered for the disc choice.

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