A language observatory is something which is built or implemented to observe and measure

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

activities in society.

The need for observatories

According to the

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

report
Atlas of the World Languages in Danger of Disappearing
, between 6,000 and 7,000 languages are spoken throughout the world and, that many more have become

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

. Concerns regarding content online have been expressed. Another

document,
Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace
noted in its preamble that "linguistic diversity in the global information networks and universal access to information in cyberspace are at the core of contemporary debates and can be a determining factor in the development of a knowledge-based society", and recommended that

establish "a collaborative online observatory on existing policies, regulations, technical recommendations, and best practices relating to

multilingualism Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

and multilingual resources and applications, including innovations in language computerization." In 2018, was create
the UNESCO Chair Language Policies for Multilingualism
as a research network to generate knowledge on the different contexts of multilingualism so to help the development of UNESCO policies, such as the Promotion of Multilingualism in Cyberspace, and the development of the UNESCO Atlas of the World Languages.

Language observatories in the world

Several language observatory activities and projects have already emerged in various parts of the world, such a
Language Observatory
an

which has a section focusing on Cultural Diversity and Multilingualism. One observatory which is dedicated to produce indicators of the presence of languages in the Internet,
The Observatory of linguistic and cultural diversity on the Internet
was active between 1998 and 2009 and regained activity in 2017, updating since then and yearl
indicators for 329 languages
and providing
data base access
to those indicators .

References

edited with an introduction b
UNESCO Institute for Statistics
Montreal Canada, UNESCO, 2005. French version is also available.
The Language Observatory Project
Mikami, Y., Zavarsky Pavol, Mohd Zaidi Abd Rozan, Izumi Suzuki, Masayuki Takahashi, Tomohide Maki, Irwan Nizan Ayob, Massimo Santini, Paolo Boldi, Sebastiano Vigna, In Poster Proceedings of the Fourteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2005). pp. 990–991,10–14 May 2005, Chiba, JAPAN.
Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives
Pimienta D., Prado D., Blanco A., UNESCO Publications for the World Summit on the Information Society, 2009. French version is also available.
Resource: Indicators on the Presence of Languages in Internet
Pimienta D., Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages, 2022. French, Spanish and Portuguese versions are also available. Linguistic research Endangered languages Sociolinguistics {{sociolinguistics-stub