When Wikitongues Co-founder Daniel Bögre Udell ES’08 visited SYA Spain this fall to speak with current students about his work, it felt like the perfect moment to revisit his story — first published in 2019 — and see how his mission to preserve the world’s languages has evolved.

According to some linguistic estimates, there are close to 3,000 endangered languages in the world, and every two weeks, one of them goes extinct. While social media and the internet have hastened the spread of English, Mandarin and other dominant languages, Daniel and the team at Wikitongues believe that these same tools can rescue and revitalize threatened languages — when deployed by native speakers and their communities.

“Our current situation is no accident of history,” says Daniel. “Throughout the 20th century and today, forced language assimilation was a common policy around the world. In Canada and the U.S., Indigenous children were taken from their homes and punished in boarding schools for speaking their native tongues. Welsh and Irish children were flogged in Britain. Until 2003, it was commonplace for public schools in Mexico to ban Indigenous students from speaking their languages. The list goes on. But today, the tide is turning.”

“We are here to help protect and grow living languages and to sustain the communities that speak them.” — Daniel Bögre Udell ES’08

When this story was first published in 2019, Wikitongues had documented more than 400 languages with the help of 1,500 volunteers. Today, the organization has grown into a global network of over 800 languages documented and over 65 communities actively revitalizing their tongues with the help of Language Revitalization Fellows (learn more).

Daniel and his team have expanded Wikitongues’ role beyond archival work. Their Language Revitalization Fellowship provides microgrants, mentorship, and training to grassroots activists who are breathing new life into endangered languages. “Saving a language is the work of a community,” Daniel says. “It requires a lifetime or more. We can’t do that work for them, but we can make sure they have the tools and access to sustain it.”

Recent fellows have developed educational materials in Yucatec Maya; launched storytelling projects for Southern Quechua (Bolivia), Scots (UK), Wymysorys (Poland) and Dagbani (Ghana); and built digital dictionaries and keyboards for under-documented languages of West Africa. The organization has also collaborated with the Wikimedia movement to increase visibility of Indigenous and minority languages through the “Wiki Loves Mother Tongue” campaign, which celebrates linguistic diversity across Wikipedia, Wikidata and other platforms.

While Wikitongues continues to rely heavily on volunteers, the nonprofit has grown its advisory board, launched open-source toolkits for oral history recording and is working towards a sustainable funding model. The mission remains the same: equalize access to language reclamation and ensure that every person has the right to their cultural sovereignty.

Daniel traces the roots of his passion back to a blend of early family influence and his year at SYA Spain. He grew up with some exposure to one of his heritage languages — Yiddish — an experience that planted a quiet, subconscious seed of curiosity. That seed became a clear and deliberate interest during his time at SYA, where he discovered both a love for languages and the politics that shape them. “After SYA, I firmly believe that most people who think they are ‘bad’ at languages just haven’t had the opportunity to study one constructively,” he says.

Through his history class with Álvaro Ávila de la Torre, SYA Spain’s history, art and political science teacher, he discovered Catalan and decided to study both Spanish and Catalan simultaneously. “It was very important to me to establish a life in Zaragoza,” he recalls. “I was close to my host family and made lots of Spanish friends, so I had plenty of people to practice with. For the first time, I saw how people politicize language and how it relates to identity and bias.”

That early curiosity set him on a path from the Hotchkiss School (Conn.) to Barcelona, where he volunteered for the Republican Left of Catalonia, a pro-independence party advocating for linguistic rights. Later, at The New School, he met fellow language enthusiast Frederico Andrade, and together they launched Wikitongues in 2014 with a vision of making language preservation open, participatory and global.

More than a decade later, the organization has become a cornerstone of the global movement to protect endangered languages — bridging academia, technology and community storytelling.

“Globalization doesn’t have to erase difference,” says Daniel. “When we amplify every voice, we’re building a more inclusive world — one where every language has the chance to be heard.”