Personal Story: Daniel Bögre Udell, Co-Founder of Wikitongues
Daniel Bögre Udell is the executive director of Wikitongues and one of its co-founders. In an interview, he talks about what inspired him to begin the project, and about his journey alongside that of the organization itself.
Daniel’s interest in language activism goes back to when, for part of high school, he studied abroad in Spain. First, he lived in the city of Zaragoza, where his experience held Spanish as the dominant language (while still asserting that the presence of Aragonese is not to be overlooked). Afterwards, he moved to Barcelona. As the capital of Catalonia, the Catalan language has a considerable presence in the city — this language is also co-official with Spanish in Catalonia. However, this was far from always the case.
During the Franco dictatorship of Spain (1936–1975), most minority languages were banned from use in schools and administration, in favor of Spanish. This was the case with Catalan. The end of this dictatorship and decentralization of the government in the 1980s, then, brought a period of revival for the language. Catalan was restored in schools, Catalan media was produced, and placenames — changed to Spanish under Franco — were renamed in Catalan. That period continues up through today, along with the struggles between Catalan and Spanish. Catalan media continues to be developed, particularly now in the digital arena.
It was this story that sparked Daniel’s interest in language activism. He eventually would intern for a political party in Catalonia, where he became deeply familiar with the battles, especially political ones, fought by Catalan speakers in matters of language:
“Where this comes back to language is… the key thing for Catalonian culture is keeping the language alive, and they have a different degree of difficulty with that depending on who’s in charge of Spain”
Daniel recounts that the Catalonian government generally pushes for Catalan to be more ubiquitous in official functions for the region, from requirement in education to media presence. Socialist presidents, he generalizes cautiously, are more amiable to this, while more Right-wing presidents tend to cite the presence of Spanish monolingual Catalonians. There is a tie here, then, between language and politics, to which Daniel was introduced by this internship.
He recalls specifically that, during the time of his work with that political party, there was increased demand for media sources in Catalan, especially social media platforms like Twitter, expressed at the time with hashtags like #TwitterEnCatalà. He became somewhat involved in such movements, later having a part in developing the Catalan version of Global Voices.
Following this thread, Daniel found a similar story in countless other parts of Europe — efforts to revitalize local languages dotted the continent. It resonated and affected his perception of his own life as well, having grown up in New York City as the grandson of Yiddish speakers:
“I grew up mostly monolingually, but my dad has a lot of Yiddish [in his English]… his parents were Yiddish speakers… and I didn’t grow up really thinking of Yiddish as a real language, I thought of it just as funny words that my dad uses… but it was something I was aware of, that he spoke differently from other people… so that’s how I got interested in all this”
These experiences would continue to influence him as he went on to higher education. For one, he would pursue a degree in history, an interest that ensured familiarity with the socio-political setting of language revitalization efforts (as embodied in the detailed account of Catalan’s situation summarized above). Furthermore, Daniel’s thesis for his M.A. in Design & Technology, would focus on the idea of a platform for language documentation:
“My design and technology thesis was a platform for language in the world — and it wasn’t very deep beyond that, the general idea of… it would be really cool to have maybe a YouTube video for every language in the world.”
Daniel’s familiarity with language activism not only produced this idea, it led him to afterwards seek to make it a reality. He found that it was the activism, not building the platform, that was most important, and the documentation project that came from this is what would eventually become Wikitongues.
The Project Begins
Daniel posted the project online, using his expertise to make a usable platform for holding the videos. From there, it simply started — Daniel began connecting with speakers of different languages, recording them and, with their permission, putting the video on the site.
From there, awareness of it spread, and he largely claims posting videos as his major deliberate effort — many of the videos simply came from speakers learning of the project, and producing the videos themselves. They recorded themselves, their friends, or passed on the information to friends they knew to speak a particular language.
“All that was very interesting, and it really kinda happened without any deliberate effort on my part, beyond posting videos…”
Networks were key to this — but networks of any type. Daniel recalled videos recorded from baristas at his local coffee shop, from a classmate he knew to be from Germany… any connection at all could eventually reach a speaker of some language not recorded yet.
“There’s a guy that worked at the coffee shop across from me, and I knew he was Mayan, right? So I was like, ‘What Mayan language do you speak?’ And he said K’ich’e, and I was like, ‘cool, do you want to speak it in a video after you’re done with work today?’ and he said ‘sure!’ ”
The environment was certainly ideal for such connections — living in New York City meant sharing a few hundred square miles with speakers of over 800 languages, and going to college in that city meant constant contact with students from around the world.
It was the speakers, though, that spearheaded all this — from the baristas and students, to humanitarian volunteers taking time to record speakers in the Balkans, to even Youtuber polyglots like Lindie Botes.
Daniel identifies that this aspect of the project never really changed — Wikitongues continues to be fueled mostly by the documentation efforts of speakers themselves, or their friends, or some other connections of theirs. The community is, to a large extent, in charge of content creation — so, naturally, there is a dedicated page for anyone to submit language videos to Wikitongues.
A New Perspective
The growth of the organization, Daniel asserts, can be understood by looking at what it was founded to combat -- the disappearance of languages at an unprecedented rate.
“Around the world, there are about 7,000 languages, as many as 3,000 of them are imminently at risk of collapsing in the next 80 years… we’re at this pivotal moment where linguistic and, by extension, cultural diversity, cultural knowledge, is at risk.”
He notes that field linguists have been, for many years now, at the forefront of combating this language loss, employing their skills and knowledge to assist communities in documenting and even revitalizing their languages — and this was, for a while, what the field had been limited to. However, there could never be enough field linguists to do this work for all those 3,000 languages.
“There needs to be a more accessible front door to getting started in field linguistics… if you don’t have someone in your community already helping you… you need to feel empowered and equipped to take the reins in documenting your own language”
The goal of Wikitongues was to do whatever necessary to “help linguistic diversity to scale” —to promote language sustainability by whatever means are most effective, to the most global degree possible. This meant, at this particular point, doing as much as possible to support speakers in documenting their own languages.
A Growing Community
It was in this environment that in 2014, Daniel recalls, Freddie Andrade, a co-founder of Wikitongues whom Daniel had met in design school, proposed expanding the organization to meet this newly solidified mission on a much grander scale.
That year began a gradual process of incorporation for Wikitongues, slowed by the busy lives of the co-founders — who were tasked with pursuing this on their own. Incorporation as a non-profit would allow Wikitongues to engage in fundraising to an extent commensurate with what it aimed to do. Lindie Botes, consistently a contributor, was momentarily a co-founder along with Freddie and Daniel, but later stepped down due to her own busy schedule.
Daniel recalls extensive proactive travel on the part of the co-founders, to spread word about their organization’s mission and garner support, additionally making connections with speakers and language communities along the way.
During this time, too, they were taking steps towards expanding the ways in which Wikitongues approached the goal of documentation and revitalization. One important piece of this period was Poly, a vocabulary elicitation program, released in 2016, that allowed contributions in the form of text conversations.
Daniel identifies the problem with Poly as having been that they “never fully considered the context of using” — there was no theory of vocabulary elicitation behind it, and the development of the system in general was not particularly well-grounded in theory.
Poly was never taken down (it can still be accessed here), as the contributions made were indeed useful (and being used), but focus was shifted away from it. It was important to Wikitongues’ development, though, because it would lead to Daniel and Freddie focusing their attention on methods like oral histories, the videos that make up the core of Wikitongues’ work, as central to their mission, and the ideal starting point going forward.
A Growing Organization
From here, Wikitongues continued to expand, recording more and more oral histories and producing more content of other kinds. Eventually, an advisory board was formed. This comprised of professionals from any and all subjects related to the work, to make sure Wikitongues was being as efficient as possible in pursuing its goals.
During this time, also, was when the project became associated with the Wikimedia project. The purpose of Wikimedia, under which Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and countless other projects are grouped, is to“help everyone share in the sum of human knowledge.” Seeking to record every language, then, Wikitongues represents an effort to document a crucial part of that knowledge.
Though closely associated with Wikimedia, Wikitongues is not fully part of that project. Wikimedia has strong requirements of open licensing — this is important to the work they do, but Daniel and the Wikitongues leadership found that the same would not be possible in Wikitongues. The right to the videos goes, first and foremost, to the speakers featured in them — so, though encouraged to allow open licensing, the speakers have the final say.
Amid all this, though, the leadership was still not only doing Wikitongues. Daniel, for one, was freelancing as a designer, and generally the organization was not particularly focused on fundraising. Then, in 2019, a donor from the Bay Area contributed a large amount, that allowed for a change:
“Last year, when a donor from the Bay Area found the organization through a fundraiser, it really helped kickstart the organization operationally — and that’s when I hired myself, I hired Kristen [Tcherneshoff] as part-time staff director… director of day-to-day programs … and since then, we’ve been finding our theory of what it means to save linguistic diversity and maintain it.”
From this point, Wikitongues expanded their range of work considerably. For one, archiving became a particular focus. Wikitongues itself became an archive of all its oral history videos, which are now preserved indefinitely — allowing it to function as a “bank of linguistic diversity”, which adds a layer of security for languages at risk of disappearing. Wikitongues also has been working with the Library of Congress, to archive some of the oral histories there as well, again ensuring the availability of their resources to the language communities indefinitely.
The organization also turned towards the more general questions of language revitalization — namely, work began on guidelines for anyone looking to document/revitalize their language. Daniel goes into more detail about this:
“People contact and ask, “hey, how do I save my language?” and we want there to be a uniform answer to that question. Now it’s not going to be a prescriptive answer, right, it’s not going to be, ‘here’s the five things everyone’s going to need to do to save their language,’ but we can say, ‘here are a hundred things that may help to keep your language alive depending on your language community.’”
Currently, approaching this general question has led to a team-effort between Wikitongues and the Living Tongues Institute in developing exactly such a series of guidelines, in the form of a language reclamation toolkit, for anyone looking to begin a documentation effort for their language. This particular effort, too, demonstrates how Wikitongues is answering the question of how to document or revitalize languages for communities at earlier and earlier stages. Eventually, then, the goal would be to help community documenters and language-revitalizers from the very beginnings of their projects.
Still Growing
Wikitongues continues to grow. The oral histories collection, as did the one begun by Daniel after his M.A. Thesis, gains new contributions all the time — adding new languages, new voices, to the project. The “bank of linguistic diversity” Daniel refers to is being added to day by day, backed by an ever-growing community of supporters and contributors alike.
At the same time, Daniel and the rest of the leadership are considering new ideas constantly. For one, there are the aforementioned revitalization-assistance efforts — Wikitongues is testing the theories that rose out of its experiences, seeing if they can be put to the service of aspiring language activists and their communities. The development of a new vocabulary elicitation platform is also a possibility for the future, possibly revamping something like Poly in a way that can bring better results in its pursuit of securing and promoting linguistic diversity.
Some Stories
When asked whether there were any particular stories or projects within Wikitongues that were especially important, striking, or formative for him, Daniel first noted it was “hard to say, because they’re all important.” Some particular cases, however, did indeed stand out in his experiences.
The first involves Tunica, a language isolate spoken in Louisiana, whose speakers have revitalized it after having no native speakers. Daniel notes the story itself and the connections made between the folks at Wikitongues and the activists in this community as particularly important:
“It was super formative for me… the Tunica-Biloxi tribe’s looking to bring their language back, so we have this hour-long video from them… but the relationships that we’ve been able to maintain with the language activists in that community have been incredibly formative and inspiring… and, in fact, the way I see it, essential to keeping language alive”
The next features the Lemerig language of the Republic of Vanuatu — an Austronesian language, currently with two speakers. For Daniel, it put the work of documentation in perspective:
“What was especially impactful there, was it was a reminder of just how urgent this work is… because, in some cases, it really is the last line… Now, that doesn’t mean the community is going away forever, but that the opportunity to preserve this language for descendants to revitalize it in ten, twenty, fifty years is now”
The last story relates to Mirandese, an Astur-Leonese language spoken in Portugal by about 15,000 people. In working with this language, Daniel found particularly clear the cultural implications of documentation work — made especially obvious here, in the fact that about 5,000 of those speakers only use the language when they return to the area.
Daniel recalls arriving in Miranda valley, and seeking out the Institute of the Mirandese Language — which itself had just recently opened up. At the Institute, Daniel talked with some speakers that were involved there. He also, though, talked to one person, who had a connection outside the city:
“He said ‘let’s go talk to my grandparents’, so we went up to a town… like, a farming town. It had a well. It was absolutely a typical Iberian farming town… and there were some young people visiting their relatives. One said ‘I feel, in a way, bad — because I come here to see my relatives… they still have that tie to the land, a tie I think is separate’. Economies change, people migrate, but the language still binds them.”
This sense of unconnectedness, that the young people visiting their parents or grandparents felt, is in a sense tied to their use of language, Daniel recounts. He interpreted this as not necessarily meaning the young folks wanted to live their parents’ and grandparents’ agricultural lifestyle, but that they wanted that “tie to the land” that comes from using the language. This experience reveals the essential part that language plays people’s lives, and how they see the world — and how important it is that they be protected somehow.
Closing Thoughts
Daniel identifies that there was “something more spiritual” in the response of the young Mirandese people, and tied it to the importance of language in general. His response highlights the motivation that stands behind the whole of Wikitongues’ development, and certainly Daniel’s own part in all of it. He gives somewhat of a call-to-arms, for those of us who think the struggle of these communities something foreign, to remember our connection to such groups:
“That’s why keeping languages alive is so, so important for all of us… and, honestly, why we should all try and go back and learn ancestral languages, which most of us… we’re not tethered to. The vast majority of the global population speaks English, Spanish, Mandarin, Bengali… the vast majority of us, if we go back two or three generations, speak another language — and we can bring that back, we can restore that… and I think that this work is really for all of us to do.”
If you would like to donate to support the work of Wikitongues or if you would like to get to know our work, please visit wikitongues.org. To watch our oral histories, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit wikitongues.org to submit a video.
