MCLC: Phonemica documents dialects

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Phonemica documents dialects
***********************************************************

Source: China Digital Times (5/6/13):
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/05/phonemica-documenting-chinas-disappear
ing-dialects/

Up to 40% of China¹s minority languages may be at risk of extinction
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/12/extinction-threatens-40-of-chinas-min
ority-languages/>. Phonemica, a project aiming to document China¹s
threatened languages and dialects through stories told by native speakers,
is currently raising funds through indiegogo
<http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/phonemica>:


We¹re a small group of linguists (and a growing group of volunteers) that
believe that there is tremendous value in documenting China¹s rapidly
disappearing languages and dialects. Phonemica is a project to do exactly
that. We are building an open archive of stories from people all over
China and the Chinese diaspora, told in the everyday speech of their home
towns.

[Š] To date we have about 50 recordings. Our goal is to have over 500
recordings up by this time next year. This is an astonishingly large
undertaking, and we are working with crowd-sourced, volunteer-generated
content.

[Š] Language is a window into the human mind. Studying diversity in
language helps us understand diversity in culture and how we exist as
societies. Sadly, much of China¹s linguistic diversity is being threatened
by ever-growing pressure from Standard Mandarin. As a result, fewer people
are teaching their mother tongues to their children.

One consequence of this is that we¹re quickly approaching a point where
children cannot communicate with their grandparents, whose stories will
then be lost. The academic side is that, with this loss of linguistic
diversity, we are losing opportunities to understand how these languages
work, giving us that much less to help us understand how language as a
whole works.


May 6, 2013 1:09 PM
Posted By: Samuel Wade <http://chinadigitaltimes.net/author/samuelwade/>
China Digital Time