In this "digital" day and age, a lot of nature's gifts are rapidly being wiped out from the face of our planet. With Animals and plants trending the most in this topic of extinction, it is hard to think of extinction without thinking about living things. I bet very few people think about Languages as "endangered" The sad truth is a lot of Languages are rapidly being wiped out of the face of the planet, even faster than living species. I blame it on rapid Globalization (a topic for another day).
You can find a list of endangered languages with a simple google search [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_languages]. This wiki might not even be updated, but you get the point. To think that at some point in the future, my native language will no longer exist scares me - to me, it means "people like me will no longer exist." It gets even scarier to think some future generations will not have an ancestral point of reference.
So how can we rescue languages from extinction? With technology. Yes, the same tech that is to be blamed for fostering rapid Globalization (the main causation of language extinction) can also be used to salvage endangered languages. It is simple; documenting and packaging a language in an app will leave a digital footprint for generations to come. Giving them an opportunity to learn and enjoy the diversity in the language spectrum (we take for granted today).
As an attempt to act on this vision, on my part, in collaboration with Pius Akumbu (a Linguistic Professor, my uncle, and a major contributor in documenting Babanki [my native language]), and a good friend Brunel, we came up with this app consisting of a simple list of Babanki-to-English lexicons known as the BabankiLexicon along with their verbal pronunciation. There is a total of about 2000 words, and we hope that, through this app, we will expand on the list of vocabulary as a community.
Please join us on this journey to leave a digital footprint of our endangered languages by clicking this link [https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.prestech.babankilexicon ] to install the test (beta) version of the BabankiLexicon.