Category Archives: Living Dictionaries

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.

Digital Resources, Language Documentation, Living Dictionaries, Support Endangered Languages

The Living Dictionaries platform now includes an Assamese interface

We are pleased to announce that our Living Dictionaries online dictionary-builder now includes an Assamese interface. This will help people in Assam (India) use the website entirely in Assamese as well as browse dictionaries for local indigenous languages such as Sora (spoken in Assam and elsewhere).

We want to be sure that the platform’s functionality is not just English-centric but accessible to people coming from many different linguistic backgrounds. You can now navigate and build dictionaries directly the platform using interface languages such as Assamese, French, Spanish, Russian, KiSwahili, Bengali, Hebrew, Malay, Bahasa Indonesia and Portuguese. Several others are coming soon!

Below are some snapshots of the Sora Living Dictionary using the new Assamese interface.

 

Living Dictionaries - Assamese interface 1

 

Living Dictionaries - Assamese interface for Sora Living Dictionary 1

 

Living Dictionaries - Assamese interface for Sora Living Dictionary 2

 

Thank you to the many volunteer translators who contributed to the Assamese version of the platform: Palash Nath, Luke Horo, Kapil Medhi, Dr. Seuji Sharma, Dr. Gitanjali Bezbaruah, Biren Baruah, Khagendra Nath Medhi, Pranab Sharma, Dhanmani Baishya, Chan Mohammad Ali, and Rahul Choudhary.

 

Living Tongues team members Anna Luisa Daigneault and Luke Horo coordinated these translation efforts and Diego Córdova Nieto implemented the translations onto the website.

 

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful, multilingual day.
Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Language Documentation, Launches and Public Events, Living Dictionaries, Projects

Collaboration with the Skarure Woccon to develop the first-ever Woccon Living Dictionary

Woccon is a dormant Eastern Siouan language that is currently being revived by the Cape Fear Band of the Skarure and Woccon Indians (who reside in the Cape Fear coastal region of North Carolina, USA). They are a tribal nation with a long, rich history concentrated in and around Brunswick, Bladen, Columbus and Pender Counties of Cape Fear. Their tribe is also known by the name “Skarure Woccon of the Cape Fear.”

The Woccon language closely resembled Catawba, and was considered one of two Catawban languages, which are part of the Siouan language family. Woccon itself is attested only in a vocabulary of approximately 140 words, originally published in John Lawson’s “A new voyage to Carolina” in 1709.

At Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, we have been working closely with Chief Lovell Eagle Elk and Teneia Blue Feather of the Skakure Woccon nation to help bring awareness to the Woccon language and to upload these words to create the first-ever Woccon Living Dictionary. Linguistic anthropologist Anna Luisa Daigneault and linguist Gregory D. S. Anderson from Living Tongues Institute have both helped lead efforts to process data and obtain all available archival materials that can inform this work. Our involvement with the tribe is listed on their website. 

Screenshot from the Woccon Living Dictionary

The next phase of work will include working with Siouan linguistics specialists to determine the correct pronunciation of the Woccon terms. In October 2021, we obtained drafts of unpublished, in-depth linguistic analysis on Catawba from the Smithsonian that will help inform future work on Woccon because it is a closely related language.

Participants at the 2021 Skarure Woccon Harvest Festival

We live in a pivotal time for language documentation and language revitalization, and most people in the broader American public have no idea what’s at stake when indigenous languages are lost, and what it takes to revive them. Many dedicated activists (including local indigenous cultural experts, students, researchers, linguists and anthropologists) work tirelessly to collect cultural data that can be used as a basis for creating language revival programs for local Native American communities. 

Why is this work part of an urgent public conversation? Languages transmit centuries of accumulated wisdom related to human adaptation and survival. They contain vital information related to land management, subsistence patterns, kinship and social relationships, local customs, cosmology and much more. Every language represents a unique way of interpreting and conveying the human experience in a specific cultural and environmental context. It is important for all Americans to welcome the views and expressions of the indigenous people who were the first to inhabit this land we all live on today.  

Researchers from Living Tongues and members of the Skarure Woccon nation also collaborated during the online event “Stories of Endangered Language Activism” sponsored by PEN America.

_______________________________
Read more:
Lawson, John, 1709. “A vocabulary of Woccon” in A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together with the Present State Thereof. And a Journal of a Thousand Miles, Travel’d Thro’ Several Nations of Indians. Giving a Particular Account of Their Customs, Manners, &c. View online.

Carter, R. 1980. The Woccon Language of North Carolina: Its Genetic Affiliations and Historical Significance

Rudes, B.A., 2000. Resurrecting coastal Catawban: The reconstituted phonology and morphology of the Woccon language. Southern Journal of Linguistics 24: 228-244.

  1. Woccon Living Dictionary. Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. https://livingdictionaries.app/woccon