We are pleased to have published a new article in “Electronic lexicography in the 21st century: Proceedings of the eLex 2021 conference.”
The title of our article is “Living Dictionaries: An Electronic Lexicography Tool for Community Activists.” It explores how the Living Dictionaries web platform is a free resource that our team built for grassroots activists around the world to document and share their languages.
Download the PDF here:
https://elex.link/elex2021/
A warm welcome to the Living Tongues summer interns of 2021! Our latest online cohort includes Isaak Spain, Benjamin Hunt, Ria Isabelle Allida Dela Rosa, Şima Doğan Balci, Ashwini Parmar, Becky Smith, Olga Olina, Abbie Amick and research assistants Ella Hannon and Ashlie Devenney. They join us from India, Turkey, the US, the UK and Germany. The team is working on Sora annotations in ELAN with Dr. Greg Anderson, Opino Gomango and Anna Luisa Daigneault.
Sora is a Munda language spoken by tribal people in Odisha State and other regions in India. It has numerous varieties, and this summer we are working on Sarda Sor, Lanjia Sor and Tenkala Sor. The current tasks focus on digitizing all of the Sora oral texts using the ELAN software for the texts, and Praat for phonetic analysis. We have been working on this research project for several years and are glad to have assistance from interns and research assistants.
Pre-Covid era, we conducted numerous field trips to Sora villages to work with various speakers, mostly recording oral texts and doing a large amount of grammatical and lexical elicitation. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, all of our work has been conducted remotely between our researchers located around the world.
Phonetics Cohort
We also have a second team of interns, Vinny Ong and Cassandra Caragine, who are working with Dr. Luke Horo on Sora phonetics. Welcome to our first-ever phonetics cohort! Here are some screenshots from our first training with them this week.
Thank you to all our interns for working with us!
We will be discussing our web platform Living Dictionaries during a panel about creative tools on Day 2. Living Dictionaries are mobile-friendly web tools that support endangered, threatened, under-represented and diasporic languages.
The co-lead scientist on this project is Opino Gomango. He is a native Sora scholar and multimedia creator who has been working for over 10 years as a trained, professional linguist, in collaboration with Living Tongues Institute. He began working as a field linguist on his native Sora language in several local dialects and expanded this work to include closely related languages like Juray and Gorum and distantly related ones spoken in Odisha and in Jharkhand State like Remo, Didayi, Gadaba, Kharia, and Santali, as well as directed research teams on the unrelated Kui and Kuvi of Odisha (Dravidian languages). Gomango received initial training in Linguistics from Deccan College, Pune, and is currently completing his MBA. He is the director of this series of Sora films in collaboration with Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson of Living Tongues Institute.
It is hoped that this film (and upcoming ones in this series) will serve not only to preserve a wide range of traditional knowledge domains and cultural practices of the Sora, but also to help promote these as valuable markers of identity for the Sora community both within India and abroad.
This project was funded by a National Geographic Citizen Science Grant entitled: “Citizen science and cinematography: Documenting stories and technology of the Sora tribe” (India, 2019-2021). Their support is gratefully acknowledged.
One of the many speakers we interviewed for the Sora documentation project was Sora cultural expert Srinivas Gomango (pictured above). In this screenshot from the film, he is discussing Lurni-sum, also known as Grandmother Spirit, a spiritual being that watches over Sora villages and is appeased by specific offerings.
While most of the Sora traditional cultural practices were still thriving a generation ago, all are severely threatened now due to state-mediated environmental, education and economic policies that impact the Sora people. The rapid advance of Christian and Hindu religious practices is also replacing the original Sora animist religion.
Living Tongues project coordinator and Sora scholar Opino Gomango has spent months recording interviews, documenting cultural practices among the Sora and curating the footage for the final series of films. This will be one of the first series of films made primarily made by a Sora person for an audience of Sora communities. Living Tongues team members Greg Anderson, Luke Horo and Anna Luisa Daigneault are also helping out with the production, editing and the subtitling of the films.
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