#lesser known languages

[studentcannotgraspj]

The Yakut Drift

Overmuch heard in relation with the language class? You've probably witnessed language analysts throwing around statistics about the mass popular languages on the internet, but very picayunish produce reports about under known, growing, or even endangered languages. The growing social learning fretwork and online dictionary \ multilingual recommend site, TermWiki.com, took landing this week to encourage its users till participate in a de facto estonian flank speed: a wiki-based noncooperation in which writers, linguists and translators compete to push their native language to the top of the most active list online.<\p>

Tournament is a quintessential component of any culture. The article generates sympathy and participation. Fashionable short, competition gets people emotionally involved in what the establishment deliberation about. Considering the Carousel, Everyman Dish out and Oscars, competitions are revered for marking the highest achievement in whichever specialism of breathless impatience they publicize. Surprisingly, however, competition among world languages is something you don't commonly hear about--until now. <\p>

The internet has been touted as something that transcends borders and languages. Irregardless, the overwhelming inimitability of online content today is still in English. To counteract this phenomenon, TermWiki's faeroese bustle gives voice to lesser known languages insofar as users fight against to push their own romanal so the top anent the chart. Through the telltale of a race, TermWiki seems till have current the stage for an unprecedented competition among its users to sink the myths of popular internet languages and forward the crosswind of less mainstream lingua franca around the world. <\p>

For linguists and translators, this language race is not just practically pride in your in store language, nor is inner man just about seeing your mother word among the top languages represented on the internet. It's also about providing practical marketing and networking opportunities up to administer to knowledge workers, translators promote their on hand linguistic, terminology and forwarding skills to subjunctive buyers. Various Wikipedia, which hides the information in regard to its authors, TermWiki uses a combination as regards user profiles, instant messaging, and term ownership management in order to create a skilled networking platform through which content developers can connect with peers and potential clients. <\p>

Links on each new or translated term lead interested viewers to the profile page of the agent or translator, and from there to his or ego personal website, CV and contact details. As an added prosperity, in that of TermWiki's highly categorized infrastructure of joint-stock company and product-oriented glossaries, recruiters searching for industry-specific terminology in obscure languages can deal with the terrain to find subject-matter experts and translators working chic their sector.<\p>

Wondering how to consociate the race? Entire you have to do is tread the boards for a free account at TermWiki.com, and start adding sempervirent terms or translating existing terms down the alley present-day your browser using TermWiki's built-in translation workbench. For translators primrose writers out there with existing glossaries, there is also an option until import sine qua non excepting Microsoft Overpass for much faster speed. <\p>

[hyperglot]

Hey, lesser known languages! Help others to learn you!

Many languages around the world aren't yet on Google Translate, and though they might have a Wikipedia (though most don't), how can we get to the point to be able to read the wiki ourselves?

I like a world that would allow me or anyone else who would like to learn whatever language we want to to be able to do so. But right now we are far from it.

Try learning Aymara (Aymar Aru) which is natively spoken by nearly two million speakers in three countries and is an official language in one of them. Or better yet, try learning Malagasy who has several times the speakers of Ayamara. Since I have been trying to learn Malagasy I will focus this post on Malagasy. But almost every time I mention Malagasy I just want you to know that you can replace that language with almost any other under represented language you can think of.

Though I would love to do a bit change this situation I am talking about here, I can't do so much without being a non-native speaker. As such I would hope that the below will offer some guidance to help others who might like to help foreigners learn their language. I want to give native speakers of these languages who'd like to see the influence of their language grow in the international community three places that they can help out by creating material for those who are serious about learning Malagasy, or even those who are just curious, could go. But before going any further I want to sink one word in:

collaboration

Yep. Collaboration is how someone who is at home, who is not a teacher, who has a day job (or night job as it may be) will be able to add to the corpus of their language out there for non-natives to use. You can do as much or as little as you want, but every little bit helps. And I can give you some great places to start:

Forvo

Forvo is a very ambitious project that aims to get every word from every language recorded. It is an excellent platform for someone who doesn't have a lot of time but would like to help out some. I have tried several languages out of curiosity but the language that I am trying to make a serious stab at quite honestly, Malagasy, as of today is looking very, very weak on Forvo. If you go to Malagasy's language page you see that there are only a measly 18 Malagasy speakers there who have recorded only 54 words (three per?) and even then at least one of the recorded words I have listened to was not even the same word that was written. This is a place that speakers of lesser known languages could make a great impact on helping foreigners lot learn their language by simply checking the words that are pronounced and voting them up or down or even re-recording them. You can help even more by adding words and recording the yet unrecorded words.

Remember, Forvo is only for individual words. This is not for longer constructs. For those you need...

RhinoSpike

What Forvo is for the pronunciation of individual words RhinoSpike is spoken sentences, phrases, passages, paragraphs, etc. RhinoSpike is really good for developing listening comprehension skills. How is works is that someone who is a student of a particular language will enter a sentence, phrase, passage, paragraph, etc., that they'd like to be able to download. How it works is that a native of this language will record the request and you will be notified. You can listen to the recording online or download it for use with your iPod, flashcards, etc. It is a great service but, again, for example, there are no Malagasy or Aymar Aru speakers using it. In fact I have requested them to add Malagasy this morning, which I am sure they will do as they have added Volapük on my request in the past.

Tatoeba Project

Tatoeba could be loosely described as a "sentence dictionary". This project is an attempt to link all languages by meanings from sentences rather than individual words. Lesser known language speakers, Malagasy for instance, can help in a few ways here. Firstly, they can check sentences in other languages they might know, like French, English, Swahili, etc., then translate them into Malagasy there online. Also, Malagasy speakers could actually add the sentences in Malagasy directly. You can also make recordings of the sentences, correct incorrect sentences, etc. But Tatoeba brings the language together in a way that others don't. It shows you how the language should actually be used, which is something that learners of lesser known languages desperately need. And like RhinoSpike, I have recently made a request for Malagasy to be added here and I expect this will be done very soon. 

All three of the above services are collaborative. They are free for their users and they encourage native speakers to help their languages to be known in other communities. I think that the reason that Malagasy, which I have mentioned so often in this post, isn't used much on these has more to do with the fact that these services are unknown to the general population other than anything else. I say this because as of today, the Malagasy Wikipedia is the 67th largest out of 159 wikipedias with 37,857 articles, which is probably around where it should be and the Malagasy Wiktionary is the third largest wiktionary in the world, with 1,522,499 pages, only smaller than English and French and ahead of Chinese! I know that if Malagasy can build the world's third largest wiktionary that with a little effort these same collaborators can give some really strong boosts to Forvo, RhinoSpike and Tatoeba. It would do lots for those of us out here looking for online materials to help us learn a language like "teny gasy"!