"Speak your mother tongue at home. Respect your neighbor's culture. Support governmental efforts to keep the planet alive and various in all its marvelous cultural diversity. Let the world speak!”

- “Language Matters” Host Bob Holman

There are over 6,000 languages remaining in the world. We lose one every two weeks. By the end of this century, half the world’s languages will have vanished. The die-off parallels the extinction of plants and animals.

Winner of the Berkeley Film & Video Festival's 2015 Documentary of the Year award, Language Matters chronicles language loss and revitalization around the world: on a remote island off the coast of Australia where 400 Aboriginal people speak 10 different languages, all at risk; in Wales, where Welsh, once in danger, is today making a comeback; and in Hawaii, where Hawaiians are fighting to save their native tongue.

View the Endangered Language Curriculum

Rupert Manmurulu, known as The Giant, writes a poem with host Bob Holman during the Coroboree ceremony on Goulburn Island, NT, Australia.

Charlie Mangulda is an Amurdak songman who lives on Croker Island, and, at 75 years old, the last speaker of his language. An expert on the other languages and cultures of the region, Charlie spontaneously remembered a few words of an extinct language called Wurdirrk during the filming of Language Matters.

Grahame Davies is a Welsh poet, novelist, editor, and literary critic, the author of 17 books in Welsh and English and the winner of numerous prizes, including the Wales Book of the Year Award.

David Crystal is a linguist who lives in Wales. An expert on endangered languages and language death, he has been thinking about language for over 50 years, and is the author or editor of over 100 books, including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.

Kau’i Sai-Dudoit, who works at the Hawaiian Language Newspaper Archive, with host Bob Holman and filmmaker David Grubin

PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown sits down with poet and host Bob Holman to discuss Language Matters and what's truly lost when a language disappears.