The act of preserving local dialects from around the world has an energetic new ally in Wikitongues, a nonprofit set up to preserve more than 3000 dialects under threat of extinction.

"Like most of his compatriots in Kosovo, 19-year-old Plator Gashi grew up speaking Albanian.

"As a linguistically curious young man (some might say, a “language nerd”), Gashi discovered the dialect he and his neighbors spoke — which is different from the one used across the border in Albania — was beginning to lose many of its older, richer expressions. Blame the influence of English, French and the general tendency to simplify language in the age of texting acronyms and Bitmojis."--Jared Goyette, PRI

Photo Credit: By brbbl - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1703001