Multilingual Cloud: saving Bangladesh’s endangered languages ^{CEFR B2}

Bangladesh has launched Multilingual Cloud, a digital repository created under the EBLICT project to document and preserve endangered Indigenous languages. Implemented by the Bangladesh Computer Council and led in part by consultant Mamun Or Rashid of Jahangirnagar University, the platform gathers written and unwritten material from many communities and makes it publicly accessible.

The site, published in July 2025 on the bangla.gov.bd portal, currently holds resources for 42 languages. It documents 7,177 topics, 97,782 IPA‑transcribed sentences and 12,646 minutes of audio from 214 native speakers. The portal also presents maps of language areas, counts of recorded sentences and a dedicated dictionary section for each language. For example, Khasi—written in the Roman alphabet since the early 1800s—has more than 300 minutes of audio across 151 topics, including stories, songs and village memories.

Global and local research underline the urgency: UNESCO reports one language dies every 14 days, and around 2,500 of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered. A national survey named 14 Bangladeshi languages at risk. A 2025 study by Ritesh Karmakar found that Indigenous languages decline when they are absent from schools and public life.

The project aims to produce fonts, keyboards, grammar tools and dictionaries, and to make these resources available online so communities, teachers and researchers can use them. Experts say the archive can help people learn basic conversation and support language revitalization efforts.