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According to recent count, roughly 3,000 languages are currently spoken across greater Asia, making the region—home to some five billion people—one of the most linguistically diverse globally.[i] Many of these languages are indigenous, and therefore they serve not only practical, day-to-day communications purposes; in addition, indigenous languages are repositories of social values, good civic behavior, and even what is often assumed a uniquely twentieth-century invention: gender equality. 

Zooming out from Asia and the Pacific, of the world’s total 6,700 languages, over 40 per cent are at risk of disappearing entirely. Many of these unique languages are indigenous. The loss of such languages thus suggests that the knowledge and histories of many indigenous peoples may soon be relegated to history.

Recognizing that indigenous youth can play a critically important role as ‘cultural guardians’ of their own heritage and traditional practices, UNESCO Bangkok, in partnership with the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), and the Asia Indigenous Youth Platform (AIYP), and with support generously provided by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is currently implementing Hooked on Peace (HOP), an intersectoral collaboration bringing together youth development and intergenerational dialogue; preservation of indigenous languages and promotion of digital literacy; mother tongue-based language education; gender equality; traditional knowledge and sustainability; and understanding and preserving intangible cultural heritage and cultural practices. Hooked on Peace further aims to empower indigenous youth to promote traditional knowledge solutions for today’s unique challenges, while at the same time preserve their indigenous languages and story-telling traditions as irreplaceable knowledge repositories.

In keeping with UNESCO’s unique mandate in the United Nations system, indeed as the only organization tasked with facilitating education, the natural and human sciences, culture, and communication and information, this project implicitly seeks to promote peace-building through empathic facilitating of intergenerational dialogue, primarily through the recovering, sharing, and preserving of stories and other narrative traditions among youth and community elders. This enriched dialogue will encompass linking the experiences of youth and elders in the project’s target countries, and focus on the potential role of traditional knowledge and cultural practices in catalysing peace-building and sustainable development. This project thus serves the dual purpose of engaging a younger generation in playing a vital role in creating the future of their countries, and engaging an elder generation’s wisdom-base and experience of the recent past—including their collective memory of ancestors—so that both generations collaboratively contribute to a peaceful future for sustainable development.

Hooked on Peace is the first new project to be launched under UNESCO Bangkok’s Together for Peace (T4P) initiative, which aims to promote digital story-telling in indigenous and mother tongue-based languages of Asia.

For more information, please contact Social and Human Sciences Unit, UNESCO Multisectoral Regional Office in Bangkok (UNESCO Bangkok): shs.bgk(at)unesco.org

#HookedOnPeace #HoP #TogetherForPeace #T4P #YouthEmpowerment #SocialInclusion #SocialDiversity

_{[i] (2023). “One UN, many voices: Why multilingualism matters.” United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Accessed on 7 July 2023 from}