Newsletter, January 2025: news from Living Tongues
2025 is underway, and we keep our mission in mind: we continue to document and raise awareness about endangered languages around the globe.
Below are some of our recent milestones and publications.
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The Werikyana Living Dictionary
Good news! The Werikyana-Tiriyó-Portuguese-English Living Dictionary is now available for public browsing. It has over 3,000 entries with accompanying audio recordings and contains an impressive array of content regarding local culture, fauna and flora.
This quadrilingual dictionary was created by the various Indigenous communities who speak the Werikyana language in the Brazilian Amazon.
Above, a group of Werikyana speakers work together on their mobile devices to create the first-ever Werikyana Living Dictionary.
The Werikyana Living Dictionary is the first-ever digital resource of this kind, and represents many years of work by many Werikyana speakers at multiple Werikyana Language Workshops, facilitated by Spike Gildea (University of Oregon) and hosted by the Institute for Research and Indigenous Training (Iepé) with technical training assistance from Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. See the full list of credits in Portuguese and English here.
This Living Dictionary was made publicly accessible to the world with the authorization of AIKATUK (Associação Indígena dos Kaxuyana-Tunayana-Kahyana). Explore here.
Conative animal calls
Last year, Living Tongues linguist Dr. Alex Andrason led fascinating research regarding conative animal calls (CACs), which are human directives addressed to animals.
These types of calls are an under-studied area of linguistics. Andrason collaborated with scholars and interns at Living Tongues to publish a new database on CACs, which is openly available for browsing and downloading.
He reflected, “In 2024, we released the first edition of the Living Database of Conative Animal Calls. With 1520 entries in 140 languages, this is the largest archive of its kind ever compiled!”
A MoveMic for Tengukan Dogon
Thanks to a donation of equipment by audio company Shure, we sent the latest MoveMic by Shure to our collaborator, Dogon linguist Idrissa Sagara in Mali, so he can use it to continue the documentation of his native language, Tengukan Dogon.
For many years, Sagara has been recording lexical lists, place names, and oral history about the landscape, and we are pleased to support his work.
Read more about our collaboration with Shure.
New publication
Luke Horo and Greg Anderson at a conference in 2024.
New publication alert! “Phonetic and phonological analysis of the Mundari vowel system”, an innovative article by Living Tongues linguists Pamir Gogoi, Luke Horo and Gregory D. S. Anderson, is now available online in Austroasiatic Linguistics: In Honour of Gérard Diffloth (1939–2023), published by Chiang Mai University.
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