Grammar and vocabulary
Terrible English and poetry
Focused on rote indoctrination
Coughing up chalk dust
When young
Language was a leash
Teacher as Thought Police
Scrolls
Graceful. Photogenic
Moving throughout history
Language means ...
Staying true to ancestry
Mother's tongue
Carries a worldview
Values and norms
Encodes oral tradition
Provides Kinship systems
Acts as spiritual and ceremonial guide
Languages, supported and thriving
For generations to come
Digitally, only some
As you scroll
Words speak to access
... And the absence of
“When you lose a language, you lose a way of being in the world.” — Wade Davis
This poem was inspired by my love of languages, Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist, and The Digital Language Divide article by Ethnologue.
The images above display the ISO 639-3 standard codes for 7,923 languages. Since Ethnologue references 7,123 living languages, I believe ISO list includes all dialects and extinct languages as well. For example, codes for Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese and Wu are included. Same for Ancient Greek and Modern Greek.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the list of the 32 supported and flourishing languages referenced on Ethnologue: The Digital Language Divide. Instead, I highlighted the most common languages found online by number of websites, based on data from the ISOC Foundation.
The map in the background is the Greenwich Meridian version from Equal Earth.
Nearly 8,000 languages — a number that challenges the imagination while standing as an extraordinary testament to our diversity . Yet only 32 are thriving digitally (0.4%). Of those, twelve dominate the internet (0.15%).
© 2025 Samantha Williams. All Rights Reserved.
