غ wikitonguesDANIEL BOGRE UDELL // BFADT

Wikitongues is a cloud-based and crowdsourced initiative to build a video database of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages. The metada sur-rounding them, as well as the topic of discussion in each invidiual video, will serve as breadcrumbs for users to wander through a rich body of content and simultaneously explore the broad relationships between lan-guages and the nuanced relationships between individuals.

When I was sixteen years old, I had the opportunity to study abroad in Zaragoza, a city located just south of the Pyrenees in the heart of Aragon, a

territory in northern Spain. I soon came to learn that most of Spain’s regions have unique and longstanding identities that saturate the country’s contemporary politics. In some cases, this manifests in unique cultures which remain at odds with what foreigners and natives alike consider to be “Spanish.” The Basque people, for instance, speak Euskera, a lan-guage with roots in the Stone Age. Their homeland Euskadi, commonly referred to by outsiders as País Vasco or Basque Country, is a region of Europe even Roman armies failed to conquer. Further east, the Catalan people speak one of the Latin world’s oldest literary languages and elect representatives to a parliament founded in the thirteenth century. Their home-land, Catalonia, has been a keyword in international headlines since September, as its government, bolstered by popular support, prepares to initiate a process of outright secession from Spain.

Context

During my time abroad, I had the pleasure of spending a weekend in Barcelona, where I engaged with the Catalan language and culture for the first time. Enamored, I left the Catalan capital determined to learn Catalan alongside Span-ish. However, back in Zaragoza, I clashed with a biting an-ti-Catalan sentiment that is common in much of the country and which many of my friends shared. “Don’t learn that language. It’s an ugly, useless one,” they would tell me. “These Catalans are crazy because they think they are a nation. They’re Spanish, don’t they know?” The ob-jections were frequent and soon became an indistinguishable blur. One evening, a friend actually said that “In Spain, we hate Catalan.” I was confused. “But didn’t you just tell me the Catalans are Spanish?” “Well of course they are! Even though they would like to think otherwise.” “Then you can’t all hate Catalan,” I teased. He shrugged furiously in response. My friend’s logic troubled me. If the Catalan people were Spanish, how could “we” (the Spaniards) hate Catalan? That moment is seared so vividly into my memory perhaps be-cause it introduced me to the truism that this world is more complicated than the borders that divide it. Of course, that’s always been the case. The centers and

peripheries of political power have always been arbitrary con-structs. But that reality is more relevant than ever, because for the first time in history, the world has conformed to a singu-lar model of social organization: the nation-state. That is to say, the world is carved into political entities that, in theory, are ruled by popular sovereignty, and each world government is therefore tied to the character of a sin-gular “people” that form the spirit of the nation. Therefore, identity in this day and age is an explicitly political phenome-non. The trouble is, all the factors that form an individual’s identity (language, religion, sex, gender and so forth) seldom

correlate harmoniously with an individual’s national identity, and so, as we intersect with the various collectives that define our individuality, we find ourselves on the periphery or at the center of politics. Of the diverse array of phenomena that construct iden-tity, language perhaps is the most intuitive window to analysis. For how can an individual express herself without it? More-over, while indivudals use language uniquely to the advantage of self-expression, each individual always uses an individual language that is shared by the fellow-members of a large-scale solidarity. The anthropologist Wade Davis has described language as the “vehicle through which the soul of each par-

ticular culture comes into the material world”. Linguist Ste-ven Pinker has described it as a “collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another.” We may then consider language to exist at the tension that is born when individual and collective consciousness intersect. The window of analysis that language offers us is rap-idly shrinking, however. Every fortnight an elder individual dies, carrying with her the forgotten words of a people. This means that unless something changes in the coming decades, as many as 3,000 languages will vanish alongside the wisdom and knowledge of the cultures these languages embodied.

However, there is an indication of coming change, which re-sides in the twenty-first century’s communication infrastruc-ture. The Internet, scientists argue, is facilitating the continued existence of cultures that would have otherwise faded into the past. In regions where indigenous languages are excluded from public life, their speakers are now able to coalesce on social networks to create vibrant, online communities. Nota-ble examples include Asturian and Aragonese in Spain, as well as Aymara in Bolivia and Peru. In some cases, languages that had existed without a writing system, have enjoyed grassroots transliteration to facilitate online use. Jamaican Patwa and Nigerian Pidgin are among notable cases. Since online space blurs the public and private, simultaneously empowering indi-viduals and communities, the internet is an ideal window into the complex relationship between language and identity.

Precedents

Few online projects tackle the question of language. In the spirit of preservation, there are a handful of activist initiatives attempting to document the world’s

endangered languages, such as The Enduring Voices Project, sponsored by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Language (National Geographic), however their website is barely designed and they don’t readily showcase their work, missing an important opportunity to engage with the public in meaningful conversation. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, currently in its 16th edition (2009), is perhaps the singular authoritative survey of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages. Ethnologue’s data, which has been laboriously collected by academics since 1951, clocks the precise number at 6,909 - however, recent field research by the Enduring Voices team suggests that the Koro language of India might boost the tally to 6,910 - and includes an im-pressive array of metadata for each of these languages. How-ever, Ethnologue’s role as an academic source disqualifies it as a project for public engagement, and its online presence is barely curated at all. Ethnologue.com has no audiovisual

content, and users are encouraged to navigate languages al-phabetically, as if perusing a print encyclopedia. The only project which has made a serious attempt to use the Internet seriously as a tool for exploring linguistic diver-sity is The Endangered Languages Project, funded initially by Google and currently managed by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council and The Linguist List at Eastern Michigan Universi-ty. Their mission statement reads that even though languages are disappearing at an alarmlingly unprecedented rate, “today we have tools and technology at our fingertips that could be-come a game changer.” The trouble is, The Endangered Lan-guage Project makes little use of this technology. The concept, to create an easily accessible and crowd-sourced video database of the world’s endangered languag-es, is sound. The execution, however, is sloppy. For instance, videos are surprisingly hard to come by. When the user finds herself on the page of a specific language - let’s say Navajo - all videos of individuals speaking Navajo exist below the fold and play no role in the website’s design hierarchy. The valuable metadata surrounding languages, such as genealogy, location, and writing system, play no role in helping the user navigate the content. Moreover, The Endangered Languages Project has no presence as a brand. Its design is forgettable. Beyond the YouTube channel which hosts the initiative’s con-tent, there is no social media. This lack of identity design and average usability pose a barrier to engagement with a broader

audience and an obstacle to maximizing the project’s poten-tial. Given the contemporary political relevance of identity, the alarming rate of language extinction, and the untapped promise of the Internet, there is a tremendous opportunity to develop a project that can initiate important conversations regarding language and its role in shaping politically charged, twenty-first century identities.

Wikitongues is a cloud-based and crowdsourced initiative to build a video database of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages. The metada surrounding

them, as well as the topic of discussion in each invidiual vid-eo, will serve as breadcrumbs for users to wander through a rich body of content and simultaneously explore the broad relationships between languages and the nuanced relation-ships between individuals. Video is an ideal type of content for project like Wikito-ngues. Conceptually, audio alone is limited. It dehumanizes language by disembodying it, because the listener can’t ex-perience the speaker’s facial expressions or body language, which are essential variables of communication. Moreover, lone audio privileges spoken languages over sign languages, which are equally complex and serve as vehicles of self-ex-pression for deaf communities worldwide. Moreover, as im-age and video sharing services like Instagram and Youtube and continue to grow, visual narrative is an increasingly rele-vant medium of communication. The information architecture for Wikitongues is simple.

Wikitongues

غ wikitongues

Icelandic

Portuguese

Portuguese

Catalan

Levantine Arabic

Hebrew

French

Italian

Hebrew

Dutch

Dutch

Aragonese

Aragonese

Turkish

explore contribute log in

Two data sets, languages and videos, are the system’s foun-dation. Their intersection, expressed in a many-to-one rela-tionship (one language can pertain to many videos), can be considered the metaphorical intersection of individual and collective expression. Languages are defined primarily by per-tanent cultural metadata, such as writing system or official status, while videos are primarily defined by upload location and tags based on subject matter. The relationships that will arise by exploring this content should be relevant to a broad range of users, from Wikipedians to linguists and serious eth-nographers.

VIDEO TAGSVIDEOSUSERS

LANGUAGESCOUNTRIES

Three semesters ago, I hacked together a Wikitongues prototype. In doing so, I collected a small body of low-res videos (taken with an iPhone 3 to host on

YouTube), which have collectively garnered more than 64,000 hits. In some instances, comment threads of multilingual dis-cussions about culture and the nuance of language (and its political implications) have evolved, indicating that this con-tent, uncurated, has an audience across the globe. I therefore have an opportunity to build an engaged community around Wikitongues, which will aid in my acquisition of content and expose presently unrealized possibilities about the project’s potential. In this spirit, I hope to fully develop Wikitongues beyond the scope of my thesis project, which could include, among boundless possibilities, an NGO. I have launched a demo website, consisting of language videos I have already collected. As I build Wikitongues over the course of Thesis 2, I intend to continue building on my set of videos, this time holding my production to a higher quality standard.

Post-Thesis