The Web is eminently suited to making large bodies of material widely available in an easily used format. The Rosetta Project is a good example. It's an archive of 1,255 languages and it's still growing.
Given the number of languages that are destined to disappear without trace in the next hundred years, it's good that an effort is being made to record as much as possible of the ones that are left.
Linguists have been recording languages in some way or other for centuries but their records are usually difficult to access. They are probably as vulnerable to destruction as the languages they aim to record. Let's hope this project will alleviate some of these problems.
As well as being an archive, this site should be of use both to linguistic researchers and to anyone with an interest in languages. And it's expected to be of use in the future, once some of the languages covered have ceased to be spoken.
For each language covered it is aimed to provide a detailed description, sample translations, the writing system, a pronunciation guide, word lists, audio files, etc.
You can search for languages by name, country where spoken and language family. Or you can browse through the descriptions, translations, etc. There's also a keyword search tool.
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