By Christina Wasson
The United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages to “focus global attention on the critical risks confronting indigenous languages” and to “increase the capacity of all stakeholders to take measures that will support, access and promote indigenous languages in accordance with the legitimate rights of the people who speak them.”In this post I describe my work with online language archives, one type of tool that can contribute to language revitalization efforts.
As internet technologies became increasingly accessible in the early 2000s, online language archives began to spring up as resources to support language preservation and revitalization, as well as to provide data on lesser-known languages for linguistic analysis. Such language archives are repositories of recordings, transcripts, and translations in a selected set of languages. They usually include linguistic analyses of the languages, and may also contain various kinds of cultural data, such as field notes, photos, and recordings of music. Well-known language archives include AILLA, ELAR,TLA, and PARADISEC.
Most larger language archives were created by linguists, and were typically designed with linguists as the primary user group. However, they are often considered cumbersome to use, and not many linguists draw on them as a source of research data. Members of indigenous groups also tend to have a hard time navigating them. Online resources created by indigenous communities for their own needs look quite different (for instance, the Miami-Illinois Digital Archive and Myaamia Dictionary).
पूरा पढ़ें-
No comments:
Post a Comment