The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone.
Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation. Much of the work that has been done, especially on smaller languages, remains hidden away in personal research files or poorly preserved in under-funded archives.
As part of the effort to secure this critical legacy of linguistic diversity, The Long Now Foundation is creating a broad online survey and near permanent physical archive of 1,000 of the approximately 7,000 languages on the planet.
The name Rosetta refers to the crucial breakthrough in the research regarding Egyptian hieroglyphs. It especially represents the "translation" of "silent" symbols into a living language, which is necessary in order to make the whole content of information of these symbols accessible.
The name Rosetta is attached to the stone of Rosette. This is a compact basalt slab (114x72x28 cm) that was found in July 1799 in the small Egyptian village Rosette (Raschid), which is located in the western delta of the Nile. Today the stone is kept at the British Museum in London. It contains three inscriptions that represent a single text in three different variants of script, a decree of the priests of Memphis in honour of Ptolemaios V. (196 b.c.).