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Around half of the world鈥檚 languages are in danger of disappearing, according to UNESCO. Languages often become endangered when parents stop talking in them to their children, when schools no longer offer them on the curriculum - or when governments don鈥檛 recognise them as official languages that need to be protected. Campaigners are calling for more efforts to preserve them - and the history, heritage and culture they carry - and they鈥檙e using an unlikely tool: AI. But there are concerns that artificial intelligence could actually create more language inequality, because it鈥檚 mainly trained on a handful of dominant languages.

So, could AI stop endangered languages from going extinct? Or will it speed up their demise?

Journalist and author Sophia Smith Galer joins us to explain how languages become endangered, how AI is being used to combat this and the risks of using the technology to preserve languages. And we hear from Ivory Yang in the US, who built an AI tool to help preserve her grandmother鈥檚 endangered language, N眉shu.

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Presenter: Hannah Gelbart
Producers: Chelsea Coates and William Lee Adams
Video producer: Baldeep Chahal
Editor: Verity Wilde