Only about 20 people scattered in small towns near the California-Nevada border can still speak Washo, a Native American language. In Africa, some 17 languages are designated as “endangered” by the researchers who track such things.

By the end of this century,  more than half of the roughly 7,000 human languages could disappear, they say. Many don’t have dictionaries or any documented grammar.
So today the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $5 million in grants and fellowships to help study and document rare languages. One of the grants will be used to create a multimedia documentation of interviews with the last speakers of Washo.

Experts are looking at the silver lining.

“Not only is this a time of great potential loss,” said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, “it is also a moment for enormous potential gain. In this modern age of computers and our growing technological capabilities, we can preserve, assemble, analyze, and understand unprecedented riches of linguistic and cultural information.”