Category Archives: Language Documentation

Language Documentation, Living Dictionaries, Media and Publicity, Projects, Support Endangered Languages

Living Dictionaries: Tutorials and New Features

Every Living Dictionary 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 Living Dictionary, you are making a difference for the future of a language.

NEWS

We are pleased to report that there are over 400 Living Dictionaries 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 Living Dictionaries 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 Living Dictionary 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, Living Dictionaries are excellent for remote collaboration. Visit the “Contributors” tab in the left sidebar of your Living Dictionary 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 Living Dictionary, 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 Living Dictionary. 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 Living Dictionary 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 Living Dictionary 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 Living Dictionaries development team

Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Language Documentation, Launches and Public Events, Living Dictionaries, Media and Publicity, Projects

Living Tongues partners with 7000 Languages to create companion dictionaries for online courses

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.

Living Tongues partnership with 7000 Languages 1

Living Tongues partnership with 7000 Languages 2

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.

Endangered Language Activism, Get Involved, Language Documentation, Who We Are

Living Tongues welcomes Dr. Nathan Badenoch

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Nathan Badenoch to the Living Tongues team as a Regional Coordinator for Southeast Asia. Welcome, Nathan!

Dr. Nathan Badenoch is a linguist who has been working in the field in mainland Southeast since 1999, researching languages, cultures and ecosystems of upland people. He is interested in the diversity of languages spoken in the region and the networks of language use that connect people. His previous work in local environmental governance facilitated his exposure to how language is used and changes within specific socio-ecological settings.

His recent geographic focus has been northern Laos, where he is currently engaged in ethnolinguistic research on Austroasiatic (Bit, Ksingmul, Phong) and Tibeto-Burman languages (Pana, Paza, Sida). He also works on Mundari, spoken in eastern India, particularly with regards to expressives in oral performance. In terms of cross-cutting themes, Nathan is interested in the aesthetics of language use, ecological knowledge and narratives of human-nature spirit interactions.
Dr. Nathan Badenoch
Dr. Nathan Badenoch
Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Events, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Language Documentation, Luke Horo

Presentation at LISPRUL 2022

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson and Dr. Luke Horo presented their work at the conference, Linguistic Issues in Speech Processing Research of Under-Resourced Languages (LISPRUL 2022) on March 2-3, 2022. The title of their presentation is “Under-resourced Languages and Documentation in India: The Living Tongues Approach.” Their abstract can be read below.

View all presentations and slides

ABOUT LISPRUL 2022

From the conference website: “There are 22 scheduled languages in India and several hundreds of under-resourced languages. Development of speech technologies like speech recognition, machine translation, speech synthesis and speech to speech translation systems for these languages is a resource and time intensive task. Apart from technology development, speech and language data collection in the under-resourced languages may also be aimed towards creating linguistic archives for community use and for linguistic analysis in digital, easily usable and open access manner. In this workshop, we intend to learn how linguistic data archiving, analysis and technology development can be accomplished in a synergetic manner.

Eminent researchers from all over the world, specialising in the fields of speech and language processing, linguistic analysis, archiving and technology development will share their experience and expertise in this workshop. Apart from in-depth discussions, the sessions are designed to have ample time for the participants to have open discussions with the speakers.”

LISPRUL Flyer
Official LISPRUL Flyer

TITLE OF PRESENTATION
“Under-resourced Languages and Documentation in India: The Living Tongues Approach”

by Gregory D. S. Anderson and Luke Horo

ABSTRACT
In this presentation we offer some details about our work documenting the under-resourced languages of India. We begin with a discussion of the two sets of languages we have worked on over the past decades in India which belong to the Munda and various subgroups of the Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) language families. We then draw attention to how we have gone about classifying these languages and situate this against computational phylogenetics based on Swadesh lists that dominate the field today. We then give an overview of the Munda Languages Initiative and detail the types of data we collect and how we analyze it and why we feel this is the correct way to do so. We then detail some of the past and ongoing scientific and applied outcomes of this work including an introduction to a powerful tool the Living Dictionary app that we have developed that aids linguists and citizen-scientists alike in creating high-quality and free documentation records. We conclude with a look to ongoing and future projects and ways that interested and qualified participants can find roles in the furthering of these projects and the development of skills in best practice in language documentation.