We are a non-profit research institute dedicated to documenting endangered languages around the world. Since 2005, Living Tongues Institute has reached more than one hundred endangered language communities in fifteen countries. Our researchers have also created dozens of Living Dictionaries to support these languages, and provided valuable digital skills training to dozens of local collaborators.
Dear friends, for the past year and a half, we have been working hard to build a new mobile-friendly app for Talking Dictionaries! It will be available for use in multiple languages. Most of all, it will help speakers of endangered languages create their own recordings for their dictionaries efficiently and easily, using any desktop or mobile device at their disposal.
Talking Dictionaries promote connectivity over vast distances, and support an online community of language learners who wish to hear and learn a language without close proximity to fluent speakers. They allow thousands of recorded words and phrases to be available at one’s fingertips. High-quality audio recordings accompany the dictionary entries so that community members, new speakers and research scholars can listen to the correct pronunciation by a proficient speaker. Engaging images also provide a wider sense of the cultural context for the language.
What are some of the features of the new mobile app?
Manage Dictionary: View & Edit Word List From Any Device
Mobile-friendly Format
Keyboards for Dozens of Writing Systems
Record & Playback Audio on Any Device
Photo Upload
Offline Mode (for Areas with No Internet)
Improved Search
Semantic Domains
Invite Contributors
Sidebar with tabs for “About” and “Grammar Notes”
For the remainder of the campaign, for those who donate over $50, we will send you a free Living Tongues T-Shirt in your size!
The 24th biennial conference of the International Society for Historical Linguistics will take place July 1-5 at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
Living Tongues Director Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson, along with Living Tongues linguists Dr. Luke Horo, Mr. Opino Gomango and Dr. Bikram Jora will be making a joint presentation at the conference on Monday, July 1st at 12:30pm as part of the North Room Workshop: on Reconstructing Austroasiatic Syntax. Their paper is entitled “Munda Historical Syntax: What is inherited, what is innovated, what is copied?” See full abstract at the end of this post.
Continuing and expanding a proud tradition, the upcoming ICHL24 will present both renowned and exciting new voices in the many domains of the field, including methods and practices of reconstruction, formal approaches to change, historical sociolinguistics and contact linguistics.
While featuring languages from across the world, in the International Year of Indigenous Languages, ICHL24 will highlight the very diverse languages and language families of the Pacific region, especially those of Australia, mainland Southeast Asia and New Guinea. With a truly multi-disciplinary focus, the conference will also showcase new advances in computational and phylogenetic approaches to historical linguistics, and new ways of placing the field within trans-disciplinary understandings of the human past.
Munda Historical Syntax: What is inherited, what is innovated, what is copied?
Authors: Gregory D. S. Anderson, Luke Horo, Opino Gomango and Bikram Jora. Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.
We argue here for a more nuanced approach to the role of contact vs. inheritance vs. innovation in the historical analysis of the word structure and morphosyntax of Proto-Munda and the modern Munda languages. Some features of Munda syntax such as verb final order clearly reflect secondary developments in Munda aligning these languages with South Asian areal norms syntactically and already took place at the proto-Munda stage, while the GEN N order with nominal possessors marked by a genitive case found in various Munda languages likely postdated that period, taking place separately in individual branches after the breakup of the proto-language. Many other features result from even later contact scenarios. Others reflect inheritances from an earlier period, aligning Munda with their eastern linguistic cousins in the Austroasiatic [AA] phylum.
Also, some features of Munda indeed find analogs in neither the languages in South Asia they are presently in contact with nor in other AA languages, and thus should be considered Munda-internal changes. Shift to Indospheric norms in the morphology, phonology, prosodic domains and the syntax has thus occurred at different times and differently in individual Munda languages, and remains an ongoing process. Thus, the overly facile explanation of South Asian contact effects in the history of Munda languages allegedly triggered by a shift in the fundamental ‘rhythmic holism’ (Donegan & Stampe 1983, 2004) of the proto-Munda language from iambic to trochaic rhythm that completely ‘reset’, as it were, the parameter settings of the language away from its putative ancestral type (ostensibly something akin to the present-day Mainland Southeast Asia [MSEA] type) towards the (present-day) South Asian [SA] areal type, must be replaced by a more nuanced approach that accepts that i) SA features have been accrued at different points in time and thus by different Munda languages individually and differently in some occasions, ii) Munda language can and do offer insights into the earlier history of AA by having better preserved some likely older features later erased in most of the languages remaining in MSEA, and iii) there are features of Munda for which neither analogs in other branches of Austroasiatic nor in other SA genetic units will be found nor should be sought.
As we shed previous constraints on the analysis of the Munda and other AA languages, we can move to a better understanding of what Munda languages are really like and how they really became they way they are, and their role in understanding earlier periods in the history of Austroasiatic. Overall, Munda languages are more similar to the other branches of AA in their prosodic and morphosyntactic structures than has previously been appreciated due to different, competing meta-linguistic filters operative on analysis within both the MSEA and SA linguistic traditions. We consider here that any (non-copied) feature/form found in any three non-adjacent groups should a priori be entertained as a possible proto-language feature/form. This holds for Munda-internal and pan-AA comparisons alike. If a feature/form is found in only two non-adjacent groups, it should still be considered a candidate of a possible inheritance from a proto-language feature/form.
Work on the historical morphotactics and morphosyntax of Munda therefore must be used to inform comparative Austroasiatic studies. Features examined include the history of Munda word/phrase prosody, morphotactics, negation, word order, case marking, referent indexing, nominal derivation and noun incorporation.
References
Donegan, P. J. & D. Stampe. 1983. Rhythm and the holistic organization of language structure. In J. Richardson, et al. (eds.) The Interplay of Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax, 337–353. Chicago: CLS.
Donegan, P. J. & D. Stampe. 2004. Rhythm and synthetic drift of Munda. In R. Singh (ed.) Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2004, 3-36.
We have a new video online for our Talking Dictionary fundraising campaign. With 16 days left in this campaign, your support is now more important than ever.
Over half of the world’s languages may disappear by 2100. It is up to our generation to create more visibility for endangered languages, and more accessibility to language materials online.
A Talking Dictionary is an online tool built with the latest web technologies in an effort to speed the availability of language resources for every endangered language in the world.
Tools such as this have the power to shift how we think about endangered languages. Rather than perceiving these tongues as being antiquated, difficult to learn and on the brink of vanishing, we can see them as modern, accessible for learning, and easily visible and audible online.
We are pleased to officially announce that we have received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation Linguistics Program. The project is entitled “Sora Typological Characteristics: Towards a Re-Evaluation of South Asian Human History” and is funded by grant award NSF/BCS #1844532. We are grateful for the support and excited about this undertaking!
The Principal Investigator of this project is Living Tongues Director, Dr. Greg Anderson, and the co-PI is Living Tongues Senior Director in the Asia-Pacific region, Dr. Mark Donohue. Furthermore, the grant includes indigenous scientists such as Dr. Bikram Jora, Dr. Luke Horo and Opino Gomango in key research roles.
This project will provide a comprehensive study of the Sora language, spoken by an indigenous ‘tribal’ people in India with a population of over 300,000. The Sora homeland is located in several districts of southern Odisha State and adjacent parts of northern Andhra Pradesh, with significant clusters in diaspora communities in Assam, Tripura and West Bengal. All of those regions have distinct dialectical zones that we will survey in this study.
We will focus on the features of Sora’s sound system, grammar and vocabulary which stand out in various significant ways, both from related languages and other languages of the region. These analyses will inform (and be informed by) current debates in language contact and language change in the South Asian and Southeast Asian regions, as well as by current work in linguistic typology, and may necessitate a reformulation of the prehistory of South Asia.
Sora presents several challenging features, including a possibly unique form of noun incorporation that has been explicitly predicted to be impossible. Once these details of Sora are better understood, and its changes over time have been analyzed, new insights into the murky linguistic pre-history of South Asia will emerge. The project also offers unique opportunities for indigenous scientists to play major roles in the research as key team members, thus offering capacity building and STEM field research opportunities to some of the most underserved and underrepresented communities of scientists. It also helps promote the visibility of indigenous peoples whose histories have been missing from mainstream accounts of regional South Asian history.
The project will produce A Grammar of Sora (with texts, a comparative lexicon and grammar of the various Sora dialects) and create an exhaustive, annotated archival deposit of the Sora dialect materials. These are to be collected through a combination of spontaneous narrative recordings and targeted elicitation with speakers, recorded in audio and video format. Topics to be explored include the ‘expressive’ lexicon, which is a highly developed system in Sora with many attested complex reduplication patterns, as well as the systems of grammatical agreement seen in different verb classes.
We will also examine the typological shifts that may have accompanied the Dravidian and Aryan migrations into South Asia that marginalized the groups already there, such as the Proto-Munda ancestors to the Sora, and the ancestral language to Kusunda to the periphery. These typological shifts may have submerged or replaced what may have been more widespread older features.
We are a non-profit research institute dedicated to documenting endangered languages around the world.
You must be logged in to post a comment.