DailyDirt: You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Dead languages don't change and evolve. It's the languages that people speak the most that develop new words and new dialects. In the past, it's been difficult to track the evolution of language, but with more and more wiretapped phonecalls digital voice recordings available for analysis, linguists are in a better position to study how languages are changing. Here are just a few interesting links on language dialects.

• Joshua Katz used linguistic data from Bert Vaux's dialect survey to generate interactive maps of how people speak across the continental US. What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? [url]
• Phonemica is a project to record the thousands of different Chinese dialects in order to preserve the richness of the language for future generations. It's run by volunteers who want to collect spoken stories, and it was started with an Indiegogo fundraising campaign. [url]
• There are several barriers that prevent various English dialects from becoming their own languages. Modern literacy and the increasing global mobility of people make it harder and harder for new languages to split off and develop. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: chinese, dialects, english, language, linguists, literacy, mandarin, phonemica, speaking, voices
Companies: indiegogo