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.

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.

Thank you to all our interns for working with us!