It is estimated that there are 7,000 languages spoken in the world today with 50% of the world’s population speaking 50 languages and the other 50% speaking 6,950 languages. Mandana Seyfeddinipur explains how globalization, climate change, urbanization and political unrest are causing the extinction of languages at a rate equivalent to the loss of biological diversity during the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and how this negatively impacts cultural diversity and decreases social resilience.

Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a linguist and the director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS University of London. The programme supports the documentation of endangered languages world wide. Of the approximately 7000 languages spoken today half will have fallen silent by the end of this century. Humanity is losing its linguistic diversity and these unwritten languages are vanishing without a trace. In her work she focuses on the documentation of these languages and the knowledge encoded within them. A specialist in language use and multimodality she supports and trains scholars in how to create multi-media collection of endangered languages documenting the knowledge of our human cultural heritage encoded in language.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx