Out of the approximately 7,000 languages that are currently spoken and signed around the world, about 500 are in immediate danger of vanishing. Languages aren’t just tools for communication; they are archives of ancestry, the carriers of memory, and they form the very expressions of how people see and interpret the world.
But for many communities across the globe, the right to speak and pass down their native tongue has been stripped away by centuries of colonization, state violence, and systemic erasure. Languages don't simply "die," but there are ways that people are fighting back to reclaim their heritage.
How have some cultures fought against the loss of their ancestral languages? And what could we learn from them to prevent a language from dying ever again? Click through this gallery to find out.