Partnership | 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

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 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.