Category Archives: Digital Resources

Anna Luisa Daigneault, Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Events, Get Involved, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Language Documentation, Launches and Public Events, Living Dictionaries, Media and Publicity, Projects, Support Endangered Languages

New article about Living Dictionaries in “Dictionaries Journal (Special Issue: Indigenous Lexicography)”

We are pleased to announce that we have published a new article entitled “Living Dictionaries: A Platform for Indigenous and Under-Resourced Languages” in the latest issue of Dictionaries, a journal published by the Dictionary Society of North America. Special thanks to the journal editors Christine Schreyer, Mark Turin and M. Lynne Murphy for their hard work. Here is the announcement from the publisher, below.

 

The Dictionary Society of North America is pleased to announce publication of Dictionaries 44:2, a special issue on Indigenous Lexicography guest-edited by Christine Schreyer, Mark Turin and M. Lynne Murphy. Read it online at Project MUSE, where, thanks in part to support from the University of British Columbia, it’s available open-access!

Dictionaries 44.2 (2023)

Special Issue: Indigenous Lexicography

Table of Contents

Editorial

M. Lynne Murphy

 

Indigenous Lexicography: An Introduction

Christine Schreyer and Mark Turin

 

The Evolution of Inuktut Dictionary-Making: From Historical Documentation to Inuit Authorship and Collaborations

Kumiko Murasugi and Donna Patrick

 

How a Dictionary Became an Archive: Community Language Reclamation Using the Mukurtu Content Management System

Erin Debenport, Mishuana Goeman, Maria Montenegro, and Michael Wynne

 

Living Dictionaries: A Platform for Indigenous and Under-Resourced Languages

Anna Luisa Daigneault and Gregory D. S. Anderson

 

Modern Wendat Lexicography: Using XML to Reflect the Grammar and Lexicon of an Iroquoian Language

Megan Lukaniec and Martin Holmes

 

The Upper Nicola Nsyilxcn Talking Dictionary Project: Community-Driven Revitalization Lexicography within an Academic Context

John Lyon, k̓ʷak̓ʷíslaʔqn Justine Manuel, and xʷəstalqs Kathleen Michel

 

nêhiyawi-pîkiskwêwina maskwacîsihk: Spoken Dictionary of Maskwacîs Cree

Antti Arppe, Atticus G. Harrigan, Katherine Schmirler, Daniel Dacanay, and Rose Makinaw

 

Designing Corpus-Creation Tools for Language Revitalization

Darren Flavelle and Jordan Lachler

 

An Open-Access Toolkit for Collaborative, Community-Informed Dictionaries

Bailey Trotter, Christine Schreyer, and Mark Turin

 

Creating the Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey Dictionary: A Personal Reflection on Fifty Years of Lexicography

Robert M. Leavitt

 

The Witsuwit’en–English Dictionary Project

Sharon Hargus

 

Thematic Picture Dictionaries and Other Visual Resources for Costa Rican Indigenous Languages: Beyond Bilingual Equivalencies

Carlos Sánchez Avendaño and Henry Angulo-Jiménez

 

BOOK REVIEWS

Revitalization Lexicography: The Making of a New Tunica Dictionary by Patricia Anderson (book review).

 

Bailey Trotter

Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Events, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Language Documentation

A Full List of Our Conferences and Publications in 2023

2023 Conferences & Events 

  • Luke Horo, Pamir Gogoi, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Aman Kumar Singha and Ria Borah Sonowal gave joint presentations at North Indian Linguistics Society International Conference (NEILS 12) hosted by Gauhati University in Assam, India, on 3-5 February, 2023.

    Living Tongues scholars at NEILS 12
  • Luke Horo, Pamir Gogoi, Bikram Jora, Aman Singha, Ria Borah Sonowal, Kelsey Bialo and Gregory Anderson gave joint presentations at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 32) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in May 2023.

    Living Tongues scholars at SEALS 32
  • Anna Luisa Daigneault and Gregory D. S. Anderson gave a joint presentation on Living Dictionaries at the 24th Biennial Dictionary Society of North America Conference (DSNA 24) in May 2023. See Youtube video.
    Presentation at DSNA 2023

     

  • Gregory D. S. Anderson presented a talk at the Symposium on Indigenous Languages in China and Taiwan: The Dynamics of Revitalization vs. Devitalization at the University of Washington, in the US, in May 2023.

  • Gregory D. S. Anderson, Luke Horo and Pamir Gogoi gave joint presentations at Hanyang International Symposium on Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language (HISPhonCog 2023). It took place in Seoul, South Korea on May 26–27, 2023.
    Living Tongues scholars at HisPhonCog 2023

     

  • Gregory D. S. Anderson and Luke Horo gave two joint presentations at the 49th International Conference organized by the Linguistic Association of Canada and United States (LACUS 2023) in July 2023.
  • Anna Luisa Daigneault gave an online presentation that was simultaneously translated into Portuguese at an event named “Língua e patrimônio: aproximações para a construção de memória” organized by the Centro de Referência do Museu da Língua Portuguesa in Brazil. Youtube link, July 2023.

  • Diego Córdova Nieto presented his work as a web developer on Living Dictionaries at a career-oriented conference organized by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in September 2023.
  • Anna Luisa Daigneault presented a talk on Living Dictionaries for the Indigenous Mapping Collective in Canada in September 2023.

  • Gregory D. S. Anderson and Bikram Jora both presented at the 11th International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics (ICAAL11) was hosted by Chiang Mai University (Thailand) on October 26-27, 2023
  • Gregory D. S. Anderson and Opino Gomango presented at the 37th South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA-37) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, on October 4–7, 2023 
    Greg Anderson and Opino Gamang presenting at SALA in 2023

    Greg Anderson and Opino Gamang presenting at SALA in 2023
  • Gregory D. S. Anderson and Luke Horo gave presentations at the 17th Arizona Linguistics Circle (ALC17) conference in the US on October 27, 2023.
  • Luke Horo, Pamir Gogoi and Gregory D. S. Anderson gave a presentation at the Tone and Intonation conference (TAI 2023) in Singapore, 18-21 November 2023.
    The view outside the TAI 2023 conference

     

2023 PUBLICATIONS BY LIVING TONGUES SCHOLARS

Anderson, Gregory D. S., ed. Munda Linguistics: Typological, Descriptive and Diachronic Perspectives, Pune: Deccan College. (2023).

Anderson, Gregory D. S., and Daigneault, Anna Luisa. Linguistic Human Rights, Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the Rise of the Multilingual Internet. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas and R. Phillipson (eds.) The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 623-638. (2023).

Anderson, Gregory D. S., and Jora, Bikram. A Typology of Grammatical, Local/Directional and Instrumental Markers in Kherwarian Languages. JSEALS Special Publication No. 11: Papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics. (2023). https://hdl.handle.net/10524/52509

Andrason, Alexander. “Onomatopoeias in Closely Related Languages: The Case of Mingang Doso and Dza.” SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 20.2 (2023).

Andrason, Alexander, and Bernd Heine. “On the grammaticalization of ideophones.” Different Slants on Grammaticalization 232 (2023): 237.

Andrason, Alexander, Admire Phiri, and Anne-Maria Fehn. “The meaning and form of onomatopoeias in Tjwao.” Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 68.3 (2023): 349-386.

Andrason, Alexander, Harvey, Andrew and Griscom, Richard. “The form of emotions: the phonetics and morphology of interjections in Hadza” Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, vol. 59, no. 2, 2023, pp. 289-314. https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2022-1037

Daigneault, Anna Luisa, and Anderson, Gregory D. S. Living Dictionaries: A Platform for Indigenous and Under-Resourced Languages. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 44 (2), 57-74. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2023.a915065

Horo, Luke, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Aman Singha, Ria Borah Sonowal and Opino Gomango. Acoustic phonetic properties of p-words and g-words in Sora. (2023). Proceedings of (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Linguistics 12.

Climate Change, Digital Resources, Living Dictionaries

Congrats to the team who built the Nukuoro Living Dictionary!

Congrats to Nukuoro language expert Johnny Rudolph, linguist Emily Drummond from UC Berkeley, and the entire support team who helped build the Nukuoro Living Dictionary over the years!

Nukuoro speakers Johnny Rudolph (right) and Ruth Rudolph (left). 
Johnny Rudolph (right) interviewing Curtis Charley (left)
Nukuoro speaker Mina Lekka (left), linguist Emily Drummond (middle), and researcher Lydia Ding (right)
Screenshot of the search results for “fish” in the Nukuoro Living Dictionary

At over 6k entries, it is a cultural & linguistic treasure. In particular, this dictionary contains a wide variety of terms related to marine life and local ecological knowledge.

Explore it here:
https://livingdictionaries.app/nukuoro/entries/list

Nukuoro is a Polynesian Outlier language spoken on Nukuoro Atoll, an outlying island of Pohnpei State, Federated States of Micronesia. By recent estimates, there are about 1,200 speakers of Nukuoro worldwide, with Nukuoro communities on Nukuoro Atoll, Pohnpei, Guam, and various places in the United States (Drummond & Rudolph 2021).

While Nukuoro is the primary language of use on Nukuoro Atoll, diaspora communities are facing increased influence from regionally dominant languages like Pohnpeian and English. Many Nukuoro community members under 30 feel more comfortable speaking other languages, or do not identify as Nukuoro speakers at all.

As rising sea levels threaten the sustainability of life on the atoll, diaspora communities will continue to grow, putting greater pressure of majority languages on the Nukuoro-speaking community. The Nukuoro Living Dictionary was created in part to support maintenance of the Nukuoro language outside of Nukuoro Atoll.

Photos are included with permission, and are courtesy of Emily Drummond. 
Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Language Documentation, Launches and Public Events, Living Dictionaries, Media and Publicity, Projects

Living Tongues partners with 7000 Languages to create companion dictionaries for online courses

Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages is pleased to partner with 7000 Languages to help languages survive for generations to come. The mission of Living Tongues Institute is to document threatened languages as well as support speakers who are safeguarding their languages from extinction through activism, education, and technology.

With these goals in mind, the researchers at Living Tongues created the Living Dictionaries platform where online dictionaries can be easily created and shared. Living Dictionaries are collaborative multimedia web tools that are ideal for maintaining indigenous as well as diaspora languages.

For communities who request them, Living Dictionaries will serve as companion dictionaries to language-learning courses created by 7000 Languages. These online dictionaries are never out-of-print, infinitely expandable resources that are freely accessible from exploration and browsing.

Going well beyond a static print dictionary, Living Dictionaries combine language data with digital audio recordings of speakers and other multimedia. Living Dictionaries address the urgent need to provide comprehensive, discoverable tech tools for community activists and linguists engaged in grassroots conservation efforts and revitalization programs around the world.

Living Tongues partnership with 7000 Languages 1

Living Tongues partnership with 7000 Languages 2

Partnerships between nonprofits like us can really make an impact. Both of our organizations are very attuned to the needs and suggestions of the communities we work with, so we make sure that every resource we put out really includes community involvement at every step.

Stay tuned for the first Living Dictionary coming out of this collaboration later this summer.