Check out our latest video on our YouTube channel! “Living Dictionaries: A Tutorial for the Languages of Africa” is a video presentation given by Gregory D. S. Anderson and Anna Luisa Daigneault at the 10th World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL 10), on Thursday, June 11th, 2021. It was great to be part of this conference.

WOCAL Conference Link: http://2021.wocal.net/

Summary: Due to globalization, cultural assimilation, the long-term impacts of colonization, as well as the policies enacted by regimes that are hostile to diversity, many languages in Africa are threatened or endangered. There is an urgent need to address these issues with comprehensive digital tools that can assist in conservation efforts and revitalization programs while creating free, online spaces for these languages and their user communities to thrive. We will present a digital tutorial to empower local language activists and their scholarly collaborators to produce Living Dictionaries — interactive mobile-friendly web tools that support endangered, under-represented and diasporic languages. Never out-of-print and infinitely expandable multimedia resources that combine language data (represented in diverse writing systems) with digital audio recordings of native speakers alongside photo and video imagery to expand cultural content, Living Dictionaries go well beyond a static print dictionary. We will cover how to register for an account in the software, create a new Living Dictionary, create new entries, edit entries, add images, upload audio files, as well as how to record directly into the Living Dictionary using a smartphone or laptop.

Learn more at: https://livingdictionaries.app/