Impact of Languages on our Society

United Kingdom loses upwards of 80 billion GBP per year to a disproportionately monolingual workforce, Switzerland attributes 11% of its GDP to its culture of multilingualism and the policies that sustain it. Listen to Wikitongues cofounder and director Daniel Bögre Udell and programs director Kristen Tcherneshoff on how languages impact our society. Today some 7,000 languages are spoken and signed around the world, but acute challenges facing linguistic communities—from forced assimilation to political exclusion—could make 3,000 of those languages fall silent by the end of this century. Such a loss would take a tragic toll upon our collective spiritual, cultural, and ecological knowledge. In response, Wikitongues is building a “language revitalization accelerator” that gives marginalized people resources to launch mother-tongue projects in their communities. Wikitongues, a nonprofit organization working to safeguard and revitalize endangered languages around the world, has been awarded The 2021 J.M.K. Innovation Prize.