Munda | Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

We’ve been using Shure microphones in our language documentation projects for many years because they always work reliably, even in rugged conditions. In particular, we use Shure head-mounted mics for phonetic elicitation as well as capturing oral narratives.

We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with audio company Shure for their new campaign – “No Voice Left Behind”. It highlights our efforts to record speakers of minority and under-served languages around the world, using Shure’s latest microphone, the MoveMic.

The photos below were captured by visual artists from Shure and Media.Monks during our recent fieldwork recording Santali speakers near Tezpur, Assam, India. We visited the communities of Barbil Pathar Gaon, Patia Pukhuri and Simalu Guri Gaon. Thank you to all the Santali community members who collaborated with us. Read more on the Shure website.

Shout-out to Living Tongues linguists Luke Horo, Pamir Gogoi and Greg Anderson, who worked closely with Shure during fieldwork and interviews for this project, and to program director Anna Luisa Daigneault who coordinated the production and logistics of the partnership.

Living Tongues & Shure In the Press

Learn more about the new MoveMic

Shure: MoveMic Landing Page

YouTube video about product details

BusinessWire

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.