Vae victīs: globalization poses the most severe existential threat to language diversity.
According to the latest available data (as of this writing) from UNESCO, there are 2726 endangered or extinct languages, with over 7000 total languages discovered. That means 35 to 40% of the world's languages are threatened. With language death follows weakening of cultural ties and traditions, loss of folktales, oral history, and ancestral knowledge.
Language preservationist focusing on low-resource and endangered languages.
Dolapo Martins is a Software Engineer at Microsoft. Her research interests are at the intersection of sociolinguistics and natural language processing—in particular, the preservation of endangered languages.
She pursues these interests at the University of Washington, where she is a master's candidate in the Computational Linguistics Master's (CLMS) program. She earned a B.Sc in Computer Science, B.A. in Linguistics, and B.A. in Classical Languages and Literatures from the University of Maryland in 2018.
