NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

nguage is driven from the ground up,” says Don Tho
rnton, a software developer in Las Vegas who speci
alizes in making video games and mobile apps in Na
tive American languages. “It doesn’t matter if you
have a million speakers — if your kids aren’t lea
rning, you’re in big trouble.”
Of 6,909 catalogued languages, hundreds are unlike
ly to be passed on to the next generation. Thornto
n, who has worked with more than 100 Native Americ
an tribes, says that some are already using sophis
ticated programs to preserve their languages. “Oth
er groups,” he says, “we ask about their language
program, and they say, ‘You’re it.’ We look at it
from their standpoint — what are the coolest techn
ologies out there? We start programming for that.”
For the vast majority of the world, the cellphone,
not the Internet, is the coolest available techno
logy. And they are using those phones to text rath
er than to talk. Though most of the world’s langua
ges have no written form, people are beginning to
transliterate their mother tongues into the alphab
et of a national language. Now they can text in th
e language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells o
f traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck drive
r who devised his own system for writing the endan
gered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet
. “You find people like him everywhere,” Harrison
said. “We are getting languages where the first wr
iting is not the translation of the Bible — as it
has often happened — but text messages.”
Traore, who left Guinea for New York in November 1
988, did not discover N’Ko until a 2007 trip to vi
sit his parents in his native village. When his wi
fe, Greta, a software developer, went into his bro
ther’s room, she noticed books in N’Ko on his shel
ves. Puzzled, she called her husband in. “You said
your language was not written. So what are these
books?” Traore was shocked. (He and Traore did not
grow up together.) When he came back to New York,