Few languages dominate the world's linguistic repertoire; the vast majority accept subordinate political status, fade away altogether, or, as E. J. Hobsbawm wrote, "become a repository of nostalgia and other sentiments".
The Long Foundation is using modern technology to bottle those languages that are threatened with extinction. The name of the venture is the Rosetta Project, and those in charge of it hope to put together an archive -- available on CD-ROM -- of 4,000 of the planet's 7,000 languages (current count is 1,200).
The reasons behind the project are primarily academic rather than sentimental: it is hoped that the preservation of the archived languages will help with comparative linguistic research and education, and will provide "a functional linguistic tool that might help in the recovery or revitalization of lost languages in unknown futures".
The project's organizers have adopted an open source approach. The Rosetta Project, they say, is the "'Linux of Linguistics' - an effort of collaborative online scholarship drawing on the expertise and contributions of thousands of academic specialists and native speakers around the world."
Check out the web site here.