This week, Professor Stephen Pax Leonard of Cambridge University embarks on a quest. He will spend a year in the remote Inuit town of Qaanaaq, Greenland, recording the language and culture of the endangered Inuktun dialect spoken there.

According to linguist Michael E. Krauss, a language is considered to be endangered when children will probably not be speaking it in 100 years. This is the case for Inuktun, but there is an additional factor of urgency to consider. Given the current rate of climate change, it is expected that this community will be forced to migrate further south in the next decade (the animals they hunt are becoming scarce). Once this happens, Pax says, they will mingle with other communities and the original “pure” language will be lost. So while there’s still time, he will be learning their language and recording native speaker audio, perhaps the most priceless asset for language preservation.

At Transparent Language we, too, support the battle to preserve endangered languages. Over the past year, we’ve worked with Grassroots Educational Multimedia to help record and document Ojibwe, spoken by the Chippewa native to North America. Recently, the White Earth Band of the Chippewa declared Ojibwe their official language, in an effort to help bring focus to its importance in their history and culture, and to help ensure their children continue to learn it.

With a reported 60 – 80% of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages classified as “endangered,” it’s invaluable to have people like Leonard bringing attention to this topic. Language offers a window on culture and heritage, and for many of these languages, the clock really is ticking.