Abstract
Abstract This paper presents the project Stimmen fan Fryslân ‘Voices of Fryslân’. The project relies on a smartphone application developed to involve local communities in the creation of speech corpora, particularly of lesser used languages. This paper lays out the scientific and societal context of the project, showcases the smartphone application and gives an overview of the results from the project that attracted more than 15,000 users. Some key methodological issues are considered, and the paper discusses the role of smartphone technology for citizen science in minority language areas while also showing new maps with distributions of lexical and phonological variation in Frisian.
Highlights
Introduction and backgroundThis paper presents the project Stimmen fan Fryslân ‘Voices of Fryslân’, referred to as Stimmen for short
Nagy and Meyerhoff (2008) find that output in sociolinguistics journals considering more than one language make up between 10 and 30% of all studies, when most estimates of the number of bilinguals across the globe are over 50% (Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams 2018)
Stimmen has been successful in engaging a minority language community
Summary
This paper presents the project Stimmen fan Fryslân ‘Voices of Fryslân’, referred to as Stimmen for short. Nagy and Meyerhoff (2008) conclude, for example, that in 449 publications and presentations in four key outlets for research in sociolinguistics 50–70% of all output concerns the English language, depending on the publication type (see Smakman 2015; Stanford 2016) Another empirical bias in linguistics is the reliance on data from monolingual populations (cf Ricento 2013). Hilton the general public as providers of empirical data has a history that goes back centuries This is true for dialectological research (Wenker 1881) for which speakers of localised varieties have always provided data for the analysis of regional variation in language. Stimmen was inspired by the language documentation application for smartphones Aikuma (Bird et al 2014) that gives the public a chance to collect speech recordings and translations. The recording function in the application in Stimmen is offered as a gamified picture naming task, rather than a speech-and-translation tool, that can be used by speakers of any variety to record any variety (as long as the researcher adds the particular variety to the list of possible languages), and multiple times, allowing for monolingual as well as multilingual recordings
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
