Introduction to Linguistic Diversity - Resource Guide 6

Today's newsletter is our sixth Resource Guide, and it's for teaching about the diversity of the world’s languages. 

Why this topic is useful

The best way to appreciate linguistics is to understand the diverse range of the world’s languages and the people who speak them. These resources can be used to enrich a variety of subjects. 

Resources

Videos

• Fantastic Features We Don't Have In The English Language Tom Scott
  Time-independence, clusivity, absolute direction, and evidentiality. 3m59s. Subtitles in English (human-generated) and 20 other languages.

• What Old Languages Sounded Like - and how we know NativLang
  Series of 6 videos (5-10 min long) about the historical pronunciation of Latin, Montezuma's Aztec, Shakespeare's English, Etruscan, Ancient Chinese, and Genghis Khan's Mongolian (all animated with closed captions in English) 

• Assorted other 5-10 minute videos about specific languages or language families by NativLang, including Ainu, Mongolic, Georgian, Mayan tense, Dyirbal, Irish, Hungarian (all animated with closed captions in English)  

• Rising voices/Hótȟaŋiŋpi
  A documentary about revitalizing the Lakota language, in full on youtube. 56m43s. Embedded subtitles for the non-English portions.

Podcasts

• Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz
  (Lingthusiasm Episode 24) Dr Hilaria Cruz is a linguist creating resources for her fellow speakers of Chatino, an Indigenous language of Mexico spoken by over 40,000 people. 38m15s. Full transcript available. 

• Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas
  (Lingthusiasm Episode 31) Dr Ake Nicholas gets her students to create resources for young Cook Islands Maori learners, especially video stories from pop culture. 39m55s. Full transcript available. 

• Living Languages - The Vocal Fries
  Carrie Gillon & Megan Figueroa interview Ebony Joachim, who works at Living Languages, about language revitalization and documentation, and the languages of Australia. 56m27s (interview starts at 13m39s). No transcript.

• Fieldnotes podcast
  Field Notes is a podcast about linguistic fieldwork hosted by Martha Tsutsui Billins. Interviews with linguists doing fieldwork to document, describe, and understand how languages (particularly under-described and under-documented languages) work. 16 episodes, with more coming. Transcripts available for some episodes. 

• Toksave – Culture Talks
  A podcast from the PARADISEC Archive, where the archived records of the past have life breathed back into them once again. 5 episodes. No transcript.

Improving language pages on Wikipedia

• WikiEducation
  General support for using Wikipedia as a classroom tool, including sample syllabi from other linguistics courses. 

• Lingwiki slide set
  Linguistics-specific information about editing Wikipedia, including editing pages about specific languages.

• Good Wikipedia language descriptions include Wagiman (Australia) and Yolmo (Nepal)

• Wikipedia Language article template
  is also useful for figuring out which sections to add. 

• You can use existing open access grammars and archives like those listed below to improve Wikipedia pages.

Open Access Grammars

• Language Science Press
  9 full grammars in their Studies in Diversity Linguistics series.

• Asia-Pacific Linguistics / Pacific Linguistics Press
  open access repository of descriptive grammars from ANU.

Archives

• DELAMAN
  The Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network. Some members have more open access materials than others. 

• Paradisec
  The Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures

• Endangered Language ARchive (ELAR)
  Based in the Library at SOAS University of London.

• The Language Archive
  Part of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. 

Tools

• World Atlas of Linguistic Structures
  Provides surveys of linguistic features across different languages. Includes summary chapters and maps.

• PanLex
  PanLex have been building the world’s largest lexical translation database by transforming thousands of translation dictionaries into a single common structure. 

• Endangered Languages Project
  The Endangered Languages Project website has information on endangered languages and a map, as well as language resources for specific languages. 

Public health as a language access issue 

• The Pandemic Also Threatens Endangered Languages
  Scientific American blog post about Great Andamanese

• Language lessons of COVID-19 and linguistic disaster preparedness
  Language on the Move blog post about minority languages in China

• Fighting the coronavirus in local languages
  Language on the Move blog post about Tibetan languages

• Covid-19 and minority and lesser-known languages
  Foundation for Endangered Language blog post about many languages in general, with specific examples from Brazil and Australia

• COVID-19 rumors highlight the need for facts
  Translators Without Borders blog post drawing connections with lessons learned from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo 

• COVID-19 information by language
  A Google Doc compiled by the Endangered Languages Project of information resources available in smaller languages, largely collected from governments, NGOs, and public health organizations

Something fun: 

A Tumblr thread on realistic translation in film. 

"okay see the thing is in one dialect this word is the name of a terrifying Demon but in a completely different language from the same area that has the same writing system and gave a lot of loan words to the first, it means ‘horse’ - and the context is really not helping”

News update:
Our thanks to Kate Whitcomb for working on the first 5 Resource Guides. You can follow Kate’s work at Layman's Linguist.

See you next week for 3 Links, 

Lauren and Gretchen

This Resource Guide is also available on mutualintelligibility.substack.com (where you can subscribe for email updates to future issues), and as a google doc or pdf. 

About Mutual Intelligibility

Mutual Intelligibility is a project to connect linguistics instructors with online resources, especially as so much teaching is shifting quickly online due to current events. It's produced by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch, with the support of our patrons on Lingthusiasm. Thanks to our Resource Guide contributor Kate Whitcomb (Layman's Linguist).

The newsletter consists of 3 Links on a topic on Mondays and 6 Resource Guides. Mutual Intelligibility posts will always remain free, but if you have a stable income and find that they’re reducing your stress and saving you time, we're able to fund these because of the Lingthusiasm Patreon and your contributions there. 

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This Resource Guide was created by Mutual Intelligibility and is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.