Our world has a fascinating wealth of languages, and for over two decades, Google has been building language technologies that cover as many languages as possible. In 2006, we started a small experiment with Google Translate, supporting just two languages (English and Arabic) at the time. Fast forward to today: nearly 250 languages are supported, with around a trillion words translated every month. Our commitment to linguistic diversity runs across products, all in service of our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Building products that reflect the world’s linguistic diversity takes far more than software engineering; it requires close collaboration with the communities we aim to serve, building in a way that’s deeply aligned and respectful of local communities, heritage, history, values and context. This is why we’ve been working on grassroots initiatives like Project Vaani in India and Project Waxal in Africa, partnering with local organizations to collect thousands of hours of open speech data across underserved languages.
But gathering this data is only one part of the journey. Preserving language vitality requires working closely with native speakers, academic institutions, and cultural organizations. Partnerships, such as our coalition with the Gates Foundation, ensure that modern digital tools reflect the nuances and authentic voices of their communities. Expanding language coverage responsibly also requires deeply understanding linguistic diversity on a global scale. This approach enables products like Gboard, our Android keyboard, to support 900+ language varieties.
To better appreciate the breadth and complexity of this speech diversity, we’ve been working on a tool to help visualize the world’s linguistic diversity, inspired by earlier visualization initiatives like Google Earth. The Language Explorer is an interactive web platform designed to let researchers, educators, and language enthusiasts discover and visualize linguistic diversity around the world. Developed as part of our 1,000 Languages Initiative, the Language Explorer brings together data across thousands of languages, building on our open-source LinguaMeta dataset.
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