Category Archives: Get Involved

Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Get Involved, Gregory D. S. Anderson

Welcome, summer interns of 2021!

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.

A screenshot of people working together on Zoom
2021 Living Tongues summer interns working on ELAN annotations of oral texts for the Sora documentation project.

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.

Charts describing vowel acoustics in Sora disyllables
Image credit: Sora phonetic research by Dr. Luke Horo, Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.

Thank you to all our interns for working with us!

Donate Now, Endangered Language Activism, Get Involved, Media and Publicity, Projects

Giving Tuesday: Help us bring voices to the future

It’s Giving Tuesday! Our mission is to ensure language survival for generations to come. We support speakers who are saving their languages from extinction through activism, education, and technology. With your help, we can protect language diversity world-wide. Bring voices to the future by donating today:  https://bit.ly/living-tongues

Every dollar you donate goes directly towards:

  • Funding our research teams to plan and conduct linguistic fieldwork (through remote collaboration with speakers during the time of COVID-19)
  • Teaching online training workshops for speakers and language activists around the world
  • Supplying collaborators with Language Technology Kits to make professional audio and video recordings
  • Creating, maintaining and sharing our Living Dictionaries with the world
  • Transcribing, archiving and analyzing linguistic data for scientific publications
  • Preparing data for use in local language revitalization programs
  • Mentoring local language consultants to become research assistants, colleagues, and ambassadors for their languages.

    Read our latest newsletter

Giving Tuesday at Living Tongues
Gutob community member in Gangare ugom (Kangapada) village, Lamtaput, Machkund, Koraput District, India, 2017. Gutob is an endangered Munda language that was documented by Living Tongues Institute between 2014-2017 with support from the National Science Foundation. Photo by Opino Gomango.


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Endangered Language Activism, Events, Get Involved, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Indigenous Language Activists, K. David Harrison, Language Documentation, Launches and Public Events, Media and Publicity, Projects, Support Endangered Languages, Talking Dictionaries, Who We Are

Speak Volumes: Meet-and-Greet in Seattle on Aug 8th

The Living Tongues Team is coming to Seattle and we would love to meet you! Our “Speak Volumes” event series is all about raising awareness about endangered languages, and why it is important to document them before it’s too late. You are invited to join us for an evening of community-building and engaging discussion at the Wagner Education Center, located at the beautiful Center for Wooden Boats. 

  • Living Tongues founder Dr. Gregory Anderson and Director of Research Dr. K. David Harrison will speak about their work as linguists who have traveled the globe to document dozens of languages on the verge of extinction. 
  • Living Tongues team members will discuss innovative tech solutions such as our Talking Dictionaries mobile software that helps community members easily create tools that help languages live on for generations to come.
  • Video clips from recent fieldwork around the world will be shown.

We are excited to meet passionate individuals who want to get involved with language preservation efforts and support initiatives led by Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. You will also get the opportunity to meet other avid language enthusiasts and ask questions about our work!

Mark your calendars for Thursday, August 8th from 7:00-9:00PM.

RSVP on Facebook

Not on Facebook? RSVP on our Flipcause event page!

Wagner Education Center
Center for Wooden Boats
1010 Valley Street
Seattle, WA 98109

Questions? Contact Living Tongues Director of Development, Ms. Morgan Mann at morgan@livingtongues.org, 803-920-5227

Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Get Involved, Indigenous Language Activists, Language Documentation, Projects, Support Endangered Languages

Volunteer Opportunity | Nov. 2017

We are looking for five remote digital volunteers to help us between Nov 15 – Dec 1, 2017. The task will involve annotating oral texts in Munda languages using ELAN software, a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources. Previous experience with ELAN is not a requirement, but is preferred. A brief online training will be provided.

Volunteers will receive audio files and annotations already typed up in Microsoft Word. They will plug in the language data into ELAN and associate it with the correct portions of audio files. We are asking for a volunteer time commitment of 10-20 hours. This opportunity is ideal for:

  • Tech-savvy students who are studying linguistics
  • People who have previous experience working with ELAN
  • Scholars interested in gaining experience working with endangered language recordings

Interested? Email a short cover letter and resume with the subject line “ELAN Volunteer Nov 15-Dec 1” to coordinator Anna Luisa Daigneault at annaluisa@livingtongues.org

Thanks for your interest!