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.
We would like to wish a warm welcome to Dr. Alexander Andrason, whose new position at Living Tongues Institute is Coordinator for Documentation in Africa. Andrason has contributed to the description and visibility of under-researched and minority languages in Tanzania (Arusa and Hadza), Zimbabwe (Tjwao), Gambia (Mandinka), and Nigeria (Dza and Mingang Doso). He is currently based in Ghana.
Dr. Alexander Andrason, Coordinator for Documentation in Africa
A global nomad, Andrason was brought up in a multilingual environment and has resided in nine European and African countries. A hyper-multilingual whose language repertoire draws on forty languages (ten of which he speaks with native or native-like proficiency), he is a pluri-disciplinary scholar who thrives at disciplines and theories’ crossroads. Andrason is an idealist who fights for the preservation and revitalization of ethnic, cultural, and language minorities.
Andrason holds three doctoral degrees: PhD in Semitic Languages (University Complutense in Madrid), PhD in African Languages (Stellenbosch University), and PhD in General Linguistics (University of Iceland). The scope of his research is broad and includes the areas of linguistics, cognitive science, complexity theory, anthropology, pedagogy, and philosophy. He specializes in (cognitive) linguistics, and its various sub-types, especially, semantics and morphosyntax, sociolinguistics and language contact, typology and grammaticalization theory, language documentation, human-to-animal communication, as well as the so-called “peripheral” grammatical phenomenon such as interjections, onomatopoeias, ideophones, and conative animal calls.
His interests include the Indo-European (Germanic, Slavic, Romance, and Greek), Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Egyptian, and Chadic) and Niger-Congo (Mande, Adamawa, Kwa, Bantu) families, as well as Nilotic (Maa), Khoe-Kwadi (Eastern Kalahari), and Turkic (Oghuz Turkic) languages. Since 2006, he has been engaged in the documentation and preservation of Wymysorys, a nearly extinct Germanic language spoken in Poland.
Arusa Maasai community members. Tanzania, 2020. Photo courtesy of A. Andrason.Arusa Maasai community members. Tanzania, 2020. Photo courtesy of A. Andrason.Arusa Maasai community members. Tanzania, 2020. Photo courtesy of A. Andrason.
Living Dictionaries address the urgent need to provide comprehensive, freely accessible, and easy-to-navigate tech tools that can assist communities in conservation efforts and revitalization programs. Led by activists and linguists around the globe, Living Dictionaries are collaborative multimedia online tools that can help languages survive for generations to come. Ideal for maintaining indigenous as well as diaspora languages, Living Dictionaries are never out-of-print, infinitely expandable resources. They go well beyond a static print dictionary by combining language data with digital audio recordings of speakers, photos and videos.
The intended audience of this web platform is inclusive, diverse and multilingual. During the live workshop, we will cover the following topics: how to create a new Living Dictionary, how to add and edit entries, how to upload multimedia files, as well as how to record audio and video directly into a Living Dictionary using a smartphone or laptop.
To prepare for the training, please create an account at https://livingdictionaries.app/. The presenters have also provided an Excel file containing a 300-word elicitation list for those starting a dictionary from scratch, which can be accessed at https://langdoc.org/training/
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.
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.
We are a non-profit research institute dedicated to documenting endangered languages around the world.
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