Rozenn Milin, Sorosoro Program Director

The excitement was huge, with an endless turnover of interns and volunteers (may they be thanked again and again!) helping us putting this website together at last, a website we hoped to be rich, instructive, thorough, but also fun and open to all. Quite the challenge.

The days and weeks that followed were also rocked about in turmoil, with a language planisphere constantly crashing, the rush to publish new videos every week, an English version, and then a Spanish version launched at the same time with the hope translations would come about in due course…

Some days during this year did eventually turn out as a nice little mess, but the outcome speaks for itself: our planisphere might experience a few glitches here and there, yet it is one of a kind, and it is now able to locate 5500 languages without a problem; week by week, our website has added up over sixty videos, all available in French, most available in English, and soon available in Spanish!

Internet users now have access to hundreds of articles, including indexes of the near 120 language families used across the planet nowadays, and a number of language indexes growing daily thanks to all the support we have received from linguists, anthropologists, activist, language lovers of all kinds and speakers of all kinds of languages.

We’re most grateful for your multiple collaborations. Thank you for making the Sorosoro website more and more popular, day after day, thank you for keeping an eye on our work, and getting so involved. Our ambition is also to create discussion and debate, so www.sorosoro.org can become a space for conversation and exchange on the themes of endangered languages, cultural diversity, native peoples, and the protection of a world that needs to remain diverse in order to remain human.

And here we are a year later, taking another step forward with the launch of… our blog! Not just an editorial like this one, which will therefore be the last: an actual blog, in which you’ll be able to take part, suggest your own views, publish your own articles and react to others’. The Sorosoro Blog will open within a week or two. So please hold on to your tongues and keyboards, and expect the chance to speak up soon; we’re about to kick off our first discussion on a subject that could stir up quite a lot opinions and reactions: mother tongue-based education.

Rozenn Milin, Sorosoro Program Director