When Daniel Bogre Udell turned 13, the small world he knew in the Poconos expanded into a much larger one in the kitchen of a local restaurant where he was working as a busboy.
It was the first time Bogre Udell, now 27, heard people speaking to one another in Spanish. That sparked a passion that has led him on a mission to record and curate all the world's languages.
Thanks to a network of hundreds of volunteers who've recorded themselves and others speaking, Wikitongues, the nonprofit he co-founded, has cataloged more than 400 of the world's 7,097 languages.
Bogre Udell said Wikitongues has recorded languages from the Brazilian rain forest that sound like "birds chirping," along with the clicking consonants of Bantu spoken in central and South Africa, and Pennsylvania Dutch, the unique, small language spoken by the Amish in his own backyard.
He's worried that not all languages will last long enough to be recorded. Every two weeks, he said, a language dies. Sometimes existing languages are spoken by only a handful of people.
"There's about 500 languages that are seriously at risk," he said.
There are a variety of reasons languages die out, including war, massacres and genocides and remoteness. Some simply fall into disuse as younger generations focus on fitting in with contemporary society. Others face laws making their use illegal.
Bogre Udell, who has a bachelor's degree in fine arts and a master's in historical studies, said he first learned about the politics of language in the Catalonian region of Spain while studying abroad. The region has long sought independence, and speaking Catalan was banned by dictator Francisco Franco.
