The Rosetta Project is preserving every language ever spoken, on one nano-etched piece of metal — from FastCompany.com by Matthew Battles

 

 

Excerpt:

…the Rosetta Project, takes as its daunting mission the documentation of every human language currently in use; some 7,000 in total, the majority of which are in danger of disappearing without a trace. Directing this ambitious venture is Laura Welcher, a linguist who has specialized in building archival resources for indigenous North American languages. They’re documenting the world’s languages and storing them on one small disc that currently contains 13,000 microetched pages of word lists from 1,500 languages.