LANGUAGES ONLINE.

Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat writes:

Any readers interested in pidgins, creoles, or mixed languages (one of those things is not like the others!) will want to know that the data for the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Languages, APiCS, is finally online and publicly browsable. Think of it as WALS for pidgins and creoles, basically – lots of pretty maps, with the nice bonus that language-internal variation in features like word order can be represented proportionally by a pie graph instead of having to choose a single value per language.

And Stan at Sentence first writes:

Wikitongues has been on the go since 2012, but I heard about it just recently. It’s a project aimed at documenting linguistic diversity and exploring identity, in the form of short videos of people speaking different languages and dialects – about 50 at the time of writing.

Nice idea, but at least when I visited the site many of the videos were by non-native speakers or people who learned the language as kids but mainly speak English now, and frankly if I go to a site like that I’m looking for videos made by native speakers, not people who want to show off a language they don’t know perfectly. Also, as Stan says, “Complete multilingual transcripts (or subtitles) would be a welcome addition.”

Comments

  1. Well, I’m going to be recording a video as a native speaker of Old Fart Eastern American English next week at a recording studio by Union Square. I’ve also offered to do a dramatic reading of a little bit of the “Pig and Pepper” chapter of Alice in Wonderland in Lojban.

  2. Here’s John reading Alice in Lojban.

  3. Well found!

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