CC-licensed, thanks to Sarah M Stewart on Flickr.

A website called Indigenous Tweets aims to connect speakers of endangered languages around the globe.

The brainchild of Kevin Scannell, Director of Computer Science at Saint Louis University, Indigenous Tweets launched mid-March and now offers information on people tweeting in 54 languages.

According to National Geographic, every two weeks a language dies, taking with it a wealth of knowledge about history, culture and the natural environment. By 2100, they predict that over half of the 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them not yet recorded—may disappear.

The site could prove a useful reporting tool for journalists as well as a font of story ideas -- from Maori to Sardinian and Yucatan Maya to Cibemba and Tok Pisin -- based on the languages spoken that span the globe.

Currently, the top tweeters of these dying languages according to the site are Haitian Creole (Kreyòl Ayisyen) and Basque (Euskara) with over 3,000 accounts each. Fresian (Frysk) and Welsh are also popular with about 2,000 accounts each.

The software defines the language of any message published on Twitter and what topics those users are discussing. Scannell provides updates about the ongoing project on his blog. He also built a web crawler for minority languages, which he says has discovered that there are currently 500 languages commonly used on Twitter.

What's the point? Scannell says the goal is to send a message to the world that says "We are here and we're proud of our languages," noting that even speakers of Basque and Welsh were surprised to find out how large and vibrant their communities are.

The website helps speakers of indigenous and minority languages to find each other in the world where English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and other widespread languages dominate.

A version of this article first appeared in IJNet's Russian edition