Wikitongues was born as a school project late in 2012, when Daniel Bogre Udell, out of an exploration on cultural identity, began recording short oral histories with friends and colleagues in New York City, with the simple prompt: tell me about yourself, or your home, in your native language. The first interviews he recorded reflected New York’s rich cultural diversity, running the gamut from Hessian to K’iche Mayan. He began posting the videos to YouTube, and the channel quickly garnered a modest following.

The project’s inspiration arose from a burning passion for language that had been amplified after Daniel spent several months working in Catalonia, Spain, where he became fluent in Catalan and was immersed in the political realities of Europe’s cultural and linguistic minorities.

In Spring 2013, Daniel’s college friend and eventual roommate Freddie Andrade joined the project. A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Freddie had been raised bilingually in Portuguese and English, and studied French and Japanese growing up. Like Daniel, Freddie was motivated by a drive to explore questions surrounding cultural experience, intersectional identity, and displacement.

Together, Freddie and Daniel doubled their efforts, recording more and more people throughout New York, and began traveling to meet speakers and signers from different language communities. They planned and conducted their first expedition: a long, winding route through the Southeast of the United States, where they recorded speakers of Cherokee, Louisiana French, American English, and Gullah.

Throughout the course of their activities, their viewership grew, and people began asking about opportunities to get involved. One of their first volunteers, polyglot blogger Lindie Botes reached out to Freddie and Daniel offering to help the project. A native of Pretoria, South Africa, Lindie had grown up traveling the world, and on top of her native Afrikaans, had come to speak English, Korean, Japanese, Urdu, and French. Together, Lindie, Freddie and Daniel assumed the mantle of organization. And by leveraging the power of internet, the Wikitongues volunteer community was born.

For a full year, we’ve prototyped and refined the interface to easily and quickly create translation dictionaries, so that all people can share their languages.

We’ve built Poly using the web technologies Ember.js and Firebase.

Want to build with us? Please do! You can join us as collaborators or fork us on Github and find us on Slack.

Poly will be free and open for anyone to create dictionaries, but we'll still be working hard to make sure it contains as many languages as possible. Aside from our volunteers, the Wikitongues community is comprised of nearly 10,000 online subscribers from around the world, representing hundreds of language communities. In other words, we can do this!

Wikitongues community members Sarah Doyle (center) and Afro Amado (right) dance with co-workers at a celebration in Port Vila, Vanuatu. The nation of Vanuatu has over 100 indigenous languages.

Wikitongues is a 100% volunteer community and all work until now has been done pro-bono. By funding Poly, you’ll be helping us hire a team of developers to speed up the project and edify it against scaling issues, and cover operational expenses, such as server space, as well as support and infrastructure services.