Talking Dictionaries

A New Way to Explore the World

For years the Enduring Voices team has helped communities around the world to preserve their culture by preserving their language. A key element to that has been recording individual speakers and cataloguing translations of their various words and phrases. Many of those collections have then been made accessible to the community online, to serve as a resource to help them teach their native language to the new generation, who all too often would otherwise grow up learning only the regionally dominant language.

Several of these communities are now offering the online record of their language to be shared by any interested person around the world. While you probably won't walk away from these Talking Dictionaries knowing how to speak a new language, you will encounter fascinating and beautiful sounds--forms of human speech you've never heard before, and through them, get a further glimpse into the rich diversity of culture and experience that humans have created in every part of the globe.

Tuvan

Tuvan is a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Tuva in south-centeral Siberia and is the first language to be recorded for a Talking Dictionary.
Ho

Spoken in India by around one million people, traditional script in Ho cannot yet be typed on computers. Although its use is not considered to be in serious decline, the language is under-documented and therefore little known to the outside world.
Siletz Dee-Ni

Siletz Dee-Ni is an Oregon Athabaskan language, very similar to Navajo, spoken by Siletz tribes once local to northern California through southwest Washington.
Matukar Panau

Prior to 2009, Matukar Panau had been neither written nor recorded. This Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea has only 600 speakers who live in just two small villages.
Chamacoco

A Zamucoan language spoken in the Paraguayan Chaco, Chamacoco is used by a traditionally hunter-gather society that has now turned to agriculture.
Remo

Remo is an Austro-Asiatic language spoken by the Bonda people of India that is increasing endangered and, unti recently, undocumented.
Muniche

Muniche is an extinct language with no fluent speakers still living in the Peruvian amazon; however, a small corpus of legacy recordings have been collected for a Talking Dictionary.
Sora

Though a comparably larger (300,000 speakers) tribal language, Sora is a threatened minority language of eastern India.
Comparative Celtic Lexicon

Comparative Celtic Lexicon allows users to see and hear 288 cognates across the six modern Celtic languages: Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Brenton, Manx, and Cornish.