Who we are:

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.

A major concern of our project is the drastic and accelerated loss of the world’s languages. Just as globalization threatens human cultural diversity, the languages of small, unique, localized human societies are at serious risk. In fact, linguists predict that we may lose as much as 90% of the world’s linguistic diversity within the next century. To stem the tide and help reverse this trend, we are working to promote human cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as to make sure that no language vanishes without a trace.

Our online archive, the largest resource of its kind on the Net, serves nearly 100,000 pages of material documenting over 2,500 languages.

What we want to do:

We have recently built four pilot Google Earth layers that highlight the benefits of using Google Earth as an interface into our global language data set. Our initial response from users has been very enthusiastic, and we would now like to create a comprehensive Google Earth language layer that allows speakers of minority languages to manipulate the geographic representation of where their language is spoken.

We envision a mashup that would add a hook for user generated latitude and longitude data for each of the 6,912 language pages in the Rosetta Archive. Speakers could navigate to the page for their language, add latitude and longitude data for the places they live or the places other speakers live. The geographic coordinates they enter would be collected into kml files that would be seeded with other Rosetta data like texts, number of speakers, audio recordings, etc.

Opening the layers in Google Earth would provide a unique, user generated vision of language spread across the world. An automatically updating kml file would allow the visualization to change over time as more users add their two cents.

This would be a powerful yet simple way enlist the support of the global web community and, in doing so, create a unique visualization of minority language use worldwide.