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.
Languages are being lost due to a wide array of factors, including colonization, globalization, cultural assimilation, migration and urbanization. Climate change, deforestation, rising sea levels and environmental contamination are drivers of displacement and migration, which in turn causes language shift towards dominant languages.
Thanks to The Weather Channel for featuring our work on Living Dictionaries on the Pattrn show. Living Tongues Program Director Anna Luisa Daigneault was interviewed by Stephanie Abrams and Jordan Steele. She outlined the connections between climate change and endangered languages, and gave an example of a weather word from the Apatani language (spoken in India).
Congrats to Living Tongues Director Dr. Greg Anderson and Program Director Anna Luisa Daigneault for co-writing a chapter in this amazing new book! Edited by renowned human rights scholars Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson, “The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights” is a groundbreaking new work that sheds light on case studies of linguistic human rights around the world, raising much-needed awareness of the struggles of many peoples and communities.
The book presents a diverse range of theoretically grounded studies of linguistic human rights, exemplifying what linguistic justice is and how it might be achieved. Through explorations of ways in which linguistic human rights are understood in both national and international contexts, this innovative volume has a particular focus on the marginalized languages of minorities and Indigenous peoples, in industrialized countries and the Global South.
Go to the Wiley Online Library website to learn more, and check out Anderson and Daigneault’s contribution to this volume in Chapter 48: “Linguistic Human Rights, Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, and the Rise of the Multilingual Internet.”
Anna Luisa Daigneault holding a copy of the The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights
Welcome to our new Researcher in Phonetics, Dr. Pamir Gogoi!
Dr. Pamir Gogoi received her PhD in Linguistics from University of Florida in 2021, prior to which she received her Masters in Linguistics from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (India). Her core areas of interest are Phonetics and Phonology and her research has primarily focused on topics related to voice quality and nasality.
Gogoi is also the co-founder of a non-profit company called VANI (Vernacular Archive of Northeast India), which aims at creating digital resources and language technology tools for low-resource and endangered languages of Northeast India.
She is currently working with the Living Tongues phonetics team in India to analyze Munda languages such as Sora and Mundari.
Every LivingDictionary helps increase the visibility of an under-represented language. To all the citizen-linguists and community activists currently creating dictionaries on our platform, we thank you for your hard work! By adding entries to your LivingDictionary, you are making a difference for the future of a language.
NEWS
We are pleased to report that there are over 400 LivingDictionaries currently being developed on our platform. Around half of them are currently available to browse on our homepage, and around half are in private mode because they are under construction or for community use only. Our platform now contains over 143,000 words and phrases, with 40,000 entries being added in the last year alone! Congratulations to everyone expanding their LivingDictionaries around the world.
Our core team has been working hard behind the scenes to launch many new features that people have requested during our workshops. Here are some new changes on the platform.
TUTORIALS
We have short tutorials available in English and Spanish. Please visit our Tutorials page.
We also have many recordings of our Zoom workshops and conference presentations available on our YouTube channel.
SETTINGS
Visit the “Settings” tab in the left sidebar of your LivingDictionary to change the configuration of your project. You can add more glossing languages, alternate names, secondary map coordinates and more. The “Settings” page is continually being improved, and is only available to dictionary managers. You must be logged in to make any changes.
CONTRIBUTORS
As many of you already know, LivingDictionaries are excellent for remote collaboration. Visit the “Contributors” tab in the left sidebar of your LivingDictionary to invite more dictionary managers to work with you. At the bottom of that page, you can now also customize the “How to Cite” data field so that all the authors of a dictionary can be correctly recognized.
EXPORT & PRINT
You can now export a spreadsheet as well as download the multimedia files from your LivingDictionary, for use offline. Look in the left sidebar and click on the “Export” tab, then select the types of files you want to download.
You can print your LivingDictionary. Click on the new “Print” button near the top right of the screen on the entries page. This will allow you to print a physical copy or a PDF of your current view of entries, meaning you can choose to print a filtered subset of entries if desired.
Exporting and printing are only available to dictionary managers like yourselves. You must be logged into your account to see these features. If you want members of the public to be able to print out your dictionary, go to the “Settings” tab in the left side bar and activate “Allow Viewers to Print Dictionary“. It is unchecked by default, so no one can print out your dictionary without you activating that functionality.
SEMANTIC DOMAINS
We have made important changes to two of the semantic categories:
– “Physical Actions and States” is now “Physical Actions”
– “States” is now “States and Characteristics” so that people can tag attributes better. Please review the contents of your LivingDictionary to see if these tags are being used correctly!
INTERFACE LANGUAGES
The platform’s language of functionality can be changed seamlessly, anytime. Click on the top right “Language” button to switch between English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, Kiswahili, Malay, Bengali, Assamese and Hindi.
PUBLIC DICTIONARIES
If you recently created a LivingDictionary and you want to make it visible to the public, please reply to this email or send us a message using the “Contact Us” button in the top menu bar of the Living Dictionaries website.
Best wishes,
– the LivingDictionaries development team
We are a non-profit research institute dedicated to documenting endangered languages around the world.
You must be logged in to post a comment.