Jejueo talking dictionary: A collaborative online database for language revitalization
Presenter(s)
Moira Saltzman
Affiliation
California State University Northridge
Topic
Documentation of indigenous and minority languages: vocabulary and grammar
Type
Papers
Abstract
This paper describes the development of the Jejueo Talking Dictionary, a free online multimedia database and Android application scheduled for release in August, 2021. Jejueo is a critically endangered language spoken by 5,000-10,000 people throughout Jeju Province, South Korea, and in a diasporic enclave in Osaka, Japan. Under contact pressure from Standard Korean, Jejueo is undergoing rapid attrition, and most fluent speakers of Jejueo are now over 75 years old. In recent years, talking dictionaries have proven to be valuable tools in language revitalization programs worldwide. As a collaborative team including linguists from Jeju National University, members of the Jejueo Preservation Society, Jeju community members and outside linguists, we are currently building a web-based talking dictionary of Jejueo along with an application for Android devices. The Jejueo talking dictionary will compile existing annotated video corpora of Jejueo songs, conversational genres and local mythology into a multimedia database, to be supplemented by original annotated video recordings of natural language use. Lexemes and definitions will be accompanied by audio files of their pronunciation and occasional photos, in the case of items native to Jeju. The audio and video data will be tagged in Jejueo, Korean, Japanese and English so that users may search or browse the dictionary in any of these languages. Videos showing a range of discourse types will have interlinear glossing, so that users may search Jejueo particles as well as lexemes and grammatical topics and find the tools to construct original Jejeuo speech. The Jejueo talking dictionary will serve as a tool for language acquisition in Jejueo programs in schools, as well as a repository for oral history and ceremonial speech. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the interests of diverse user communities may be addressed by the methodology, organization and scope of talking dictionaries.
