Newsletter: Highlights from 2024
We had a big year! From wrapping up the extensive Sora language documentation project in India, to publishing new works and training researchers focused on endangered languages, 2024 was one of our strongest years yet.
Below, members of our team recap some of our favorite milestones from the past year.
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The Sora language project
Our team, led by Dr. Greg Anderson, worked so hard on finishing the Sora language project this year. This is a huge milestone for the documentation of Munda languages in India.
As Greg noted at the end of the year, “The highlight for me this year was finishing the huge volume on Sora grammar (1200 pages!) and a very large collection of texts in five Sora varieties that is close to 800 pages long. This was the culmination of two decades of work!”
Living Dictionaries
We create free online Living Dictionaries, bringing many under-resourced languages online for the first time.
This past year alone, we added dozens of new dictionaries for minority and endangered languages to our online platform, and added over 100k new dictionary entries, for a total of 400k entries now available on the platform. We are one of the only organizations in the world doing this type of work.
As our Program Director Anna Luisa Daigneault noted, “What a year! There are now over 1,000 citizen-linguists using our Living Dictionaries platform, and the website houses over 400,000 entries! These are huge milestones for the future of under-resourced languages. I’m immensely proud of everyone involved in this work.”
Research assistants and interns
We welcomed new research assistants from around the world, and many cohorts of interns working on phonetics analysis in Praat. Several interns returned multiple times to gain experience with us.
Many of them have been inspired by the innovative work of Dr. Luke Horo and Dr. Greg Anderson in phonetics. As Dr. Horo noted, “It was amazing to see how much our research assistants have grown this year, and how much they are motivated to continue analyzing the sound systems of endangered languages.”
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Above, an international group of interns works on a Mundari phonetic analysis project in Praat.
Above, a group of interns works on projects on the Living Dictionaries platform.
New publication
New publication alert! “Hunting Gestures in Tjwao” is out today in the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics.
Congratulations to the research team: Living Tongues linguists Alexander Andrason and Admire Phiri, in collaboration with Susanne Mohr (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and two of the last Tjwao speakers, Ndliso Sibanda and Mthandazo Vundla.
With only 7 speakers left (all over the age of 70), Tjwao is an endangered Khoe language spoken in the Tsholotsho District of Zimbabwe.
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We invite you to contribute to our goal of documenting languages at risk of disappearing. Thanks for your support!