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