8 July 2016 in Beijing, People’s Republic of China

UNESCO and Talkmate host an official launch event to celebrate the beginning of a new and exciting partnership on the development of the World Atlas of Languages. The joint partnership aims at developing innovative and scalable ICT-supported models to access data on linguistic diversity around the world, encourage collaboration among different stakeholders and raise awareness on the importance of linguistic diversity and multilingualism for sustainable and inclusive development.

Building on the existing UNESCO’s Atlas of Languages in Danger, a new online collaborative platform “World Atlas of Languages” will provide a wide range of technical and collaborative facilities to all stakeholders to access and share own data on linguistic diversity, information about good practices, existing language teaching and learning solutions, and host user-generated content.

UNESCO and Talkmate launch event brings together a number of leading scientists, governmental officials, public and private organizations, UN organizations, as well as civil society to raise awareness of all stakeholders on the importance of linguistic diversity and multilingualism for sustainable and inclusive development. Accordingly, the thematic roundtable on “Language matters for development” assesses the current situation of linguistic diversity, identify existing challenges and new opportunities arising from scientific and technological development, and exchange the scientific information among higher educational institutions, national public institutions on language linguistic diversity, and application of languages in different domains, as well as form a new institutional network working on language issues.