Endangered Languages Around the World

Recently in my newsfeed, I came to see a note that 21st February was the International Mother Language celebration day, this “piqued my interest” further, so I started to read up on what the celebration was all about and it lead me into the area of Endangered Languages.

My family on my mother’s side is speaking a dying language named Meänkieli, which is spoken in the valley of the Torne River. Meänmaa (Meänkieli for ‘”Our Land”‘) is the name of this area in Meänkieli. I did not grow up in this area, I never learnt the language, and my mom was not interested in teaching it to me and my siblings even when we spend most summers in Meänmaa.

There were many times as a grown-up that I would have had use of knowing the Meänkieli language, I remember one time I was up there to visit family, my aunt took me to see my grandfathers brother, we could not communicate without my aunt, as my grandfather’s brother did not speak Swedish, he spoke Meänkieli and finish which I was not able to speak.

Why am I telling you this, Meänkieli happens to be one of the endangered languages and that lead me into getting more into how many endangered languages there are around the world. I built a data pipeline from a dataset I got from The Endangered Languages Database

Data Pipeline

The data pipeline is simple, I used Google Sheets and Google Data Studio to create this map.

The Data Pipeline Architecture

I imported the dataset I download from The Endangered Languages Database into Google Sheet, I did not do any data cleaning rather used the data as is, the only thing I did was to add a header line to the dataset in Google Sheet and put some column names in it.

Endangered Languages