elan | Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

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!

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!