Can AI help us save endangered languages? - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service

Around half of the world’s languages are in danger of disappearing, according to Unesco. Click here to subscribe to our channel 👉🏽 https://bbc.in/3VyyriM Languages often become endangered when parents stop talking in them to their children, when schools no longer offer them on the curriculum - or when governments don’t recognise them as official languages that need to be protected. Campaigners are calling for more efforts to preserve them - and the history, heritage and culture they carry - and they’re using an unlikely tool: AI. But there are concerns that artificial intelligence could actually create more language inequality, because it’s mainly trained on a handful of dominant languages. So, could AI stop endangered languages from going extinct? Or will it speed up their demise? Journalist and author Sophia Smith Galer joins us to explain how languages become endangered, how AI is being used to combat this and the risks of using the technology to preserve languages. And we hear from Ivory Yang in the US, who built an AI tool to help preserve her grandmother’s endangered language, Nüshu. This video replaces an earlier version of this episode which had a shorter explanation of the Emilian experiment testing AI's translation capabilities. 00:00 Introduction 00:53 Are languages disappearing more quickly? 01:50 Which languages are most at risk? 02:54 What makes a language endangered? 04:33 What's at stake when a language disappears? 06:09 How AI is being used to preserve languages 07:08 Ivory Yang: preserving Nüshu with AI 08:10 Putting AI to the test: the Emilian experiment 10:39 The Manx language: when AI gets it badly wrong 11:55 The risks of using AI for endangered languages 13:09 Is there hope for the future of language preservation? 14:18 Outro & listener comments Watch more episodes from What in the World here 👉🏽 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz_B0PFGIn4eMOlGZclzdcHmv7s8BFQE6 Instagram: @bbcwhatintheworld Email: whatintheworld@bbc.co.uk WhatsApp: +44 330 12 33 22 6 Presenter: Hannah Gelbart Producers: Chelsea Coates, William Lee Adams and Benita Barden Video producer: Baldeep Chahal Editor: Verity Wilde ---------------- This is the official BBC World Service YouTube channel. If you like what we do, you can also find us here: Instagram 👉🏽 https://www.instagram.com/bbcworldservice Twitter 👉🏽 https://twitter.com/bbcworldservice Facebook 👉🏽 https://facebook.com/bbcworldservice BBC World Service website 👉🏽 https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldserviceradio Thanks for watching and subscribing! #BBCWorldService #WorldService #ai #artificialintelligence #languages