Last Words
A language dies every two weeks. We write the obituaries — with maps, family trees, and the untranslatable words the world just lost.
Consumer-facing endangered language death tracking — automated language obituaries, regional endangerment dashboards, linguistic uniqueness scorecards, "what dies with this language" feature spotlights, revitalization progress reports, and weekly dispatches that make you *feel* what it means when a language with no word for "ownership" but twelve words for types of snow vanishes from the Earth. Powered by Glottolog, WALS, OpenAlex, and Wikidata — all free, all open, all machine-readable.
Niche Explored
Endangered language death tracking — automated obituaries, status dashboards, and revitalization scorecards for the world’s ~3,000 endangered languages, powered by open linguistic databases.
Existing Competition
- Endangered Languages Project (endangeredlanguages.com) — Google-backed, community-driven catalog. Good directory, but static entries with no data journalism, no automated updates, no visual storytelling, no “obituaries” or trend analysis. Academic tone.
- Ethnologue (ethnologue.com) — Paywalled ($500/yr). Comprehensive catalog but not consumer-facing. No storytelling. No free bulk data access.
- UNESCO Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger — Dataset completed in 2010, NOT updated since. UNESCO itself acknowledges the data is stale. No active web presence beyond a PDF atlas.
- Glottolog (glottolog.org) — Academic linguistic reference (Max Planck). Comprehensive, open data, GitHub repo, but raw/academic — zero consumer-facing design.
- WALS Online (wals.info) — Structural language features database. Academic tool, not consumer content.
- Individual blogs/YouTubers — Scattered linguistics YouTubers (NativLang, Langfocus) cover endangered languages episodically, but no automated tracker or dashboard exists.
Key gap: Nobody is doing automated, beautiful, opinionated data journalism about language death. The datasets are rich and free. The emotional hook is massive. The competition is either paywalled (Ethnologue), stale (UNESCO), or academic (Glottolog). Zero consumer-facing sites with personality.
Data Sources Found
- Glottolog CLDF Dataset — https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog-cldf — CC-BY, ~8,000+ languoids, genealogical classification, endangerment status (AES — Agglomerated Endangerment Status), geographic coordinates, bibliography. Updated regularly (latest: v5.3, 2026). Can clone/download as CSV/JSON.
- Glottolog GitHub Repo — https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog — INI files per languoid, full classification tree, machine-readable.
- WALS Online — https://wals.info — 192 structural features across 2,679 languages. CC-BY. Useful for “linguistic uniqueness” scoring — what grammatical features die with a language.
- Endangered Languages Project API/Data — https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/ — offers “Download the Data” option. Community-contributed resources, language champion stories.
- Wikipedia / Wikidata — Wikidata SPARQL endpoint can query all languages by ISO 639-3 code, speaker counts, endangerment status. Useful for automated cross-referencing.
- Ethnologue (limited) — Ethnologue provides some free summary data. The language status scale (EGIDS) is useful.
- OpenAlex / Semantic Scholar — Track new linguistics papers mentioning specific endangered languages. Free APIs. Can detect research momentum (or absence) for a given language.
- Google Ngram Viewer API — Track mentions of specific languages in published literature over time.
- iNaturalist / GBIF — For indigenous ecological knowledge sections (species with names only in endangered languages).
- PubMed/OpenAlex — Research on cognitive/social effects of language loss.
SEO Analysis
- Keywords: “endangered languages list” (~6,600/mo), “dying languages” (~4,400/mo), “how many languages are endangered” (~2,400/mo), “extinct languages” (~5,400/mo), “language death” (~3,200/mo), “UNESCO endangered languages” (~1,900/mo)
- Long-tail: “endangered languages in [country]” — India, Australia, Africa, USA all have significant search volume
- Content gap: Most results are Wikipedia listicles, UNESCO’s stale atlas, or academic papers. Zero data journalism. Zero visual storytelling. Zero automated dashboards.
- Difficulty: Medium — Wikipedia dominates informational queries, but long-tail specific-language queries have low competition
- Featured snippet potential: High — structured data about specific languages (speaker counts, location, status) is snippet-ready
Communities
- r/linguistics (~2M members) — huge engagement on endangered language posts
- r/conlangs (~180K) — crossover interest
- r/languagelearning (~1.2M) — peripheral interest
- Language revival Twitter/X community — Welsh, Irish, Māori, Hawaiian revival activists are vocal and share
- Indigenous language advocacy orgs — FPCC (Canada), AILDI (Arizona), Endangered Languages Project community
- Linguistics Twitter/X — academic linguists who study documentation and revitalization
- Diaspora communities — enormous emotional connection to heritage languages
Image/Graphic Feasibility
- Maps — Excellent. Glottolog provides lat/long for every language. Can generate beautiful language family maps, endangerment heatmaps, “extinction zone” maps
- Family trees — Genealogical classification trees are stunning when visualized (D3.js)
- Speaker count timelines — Decline charts over decades
- “Unique feature” diagrams — What grammatical structures die with a language (click consonants, evidentiality, ergative alignment)
- Obituary cards — Designed memorial cards for recently extinct languages
- Sound spectrograms — If audio samples are available (ELP has some), can visualize the phonetic inventory
- Infographics — “What we lose” cards showing unique vocabulary with no translation
Sources
- https://glottolog.org/ — Glottolog 5.3 (Max Planck, CC-BY)
- https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog — GitHub repo with full data
- https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog-cldf — CLDF dataset
- https://wals.info/ — World Atlas of Language Structures
- https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/ — Endangered Languages Project
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death — Background
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_languages — Regional lists
- https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service — Wikidata SPARQL for language data
- https://openalex.org/ — Academic paper tracking