So I'm researching the ways that people go about preserving languages that have very few remaining speakers and/or have never been written down. According to good old wikipedia, about 417 languages are in danger of extinction.
Many of these programs seem to be run by universities. Linguistics and anthropology students get to go to places like Thailand or South America and spend time talking to the people there and essentially creating dictionaries. It's a really interesting process because often words can be translated in a variety of ways, so the translators have to really get to know the culture to get an accurate documentation. They listen to and write down the traditional stories as well. It's not just a process of saying "this word means such and such".
Another thing they do in these programs is to encourage the kids to speak their native language in school, which is the most effective way to stop a language from dying out.
There's so much to find out about this stuff, but that will probably do for now.
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