[1][2] The project works through an open-contribution, open-review process similar to the one that created the Oxford English Dictionary.

As part of the effort to secure this critical legacy of linguistic diversity, the Long Now Foundation plans a broad online survey and near-permanent physical archive of 1,500 of the approximately 7,000 human languages.

The project has three overlapping goals: The 1,500-language corpus expands on the parallel-text structure of the original Rosetta Stone through archiving ten descriptive components for each of the 1,500 selected languages.

The goal is an open source "Linux of Linguistics"—an effort of collaborative online scholarship drawing on the expertise and contributions of thousands of academic specialists and native speakers around the world.

[7] It was developed using a similar manufacturing process as the first edition of the Rosetta Disk, the main difference being that the final archive is about 2 cm (0.79 in) in diameter, thus enabling wearing as an ornament on the human body.