PASAGLOSSA: Mapping the world's linguistic diversity

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2013-03-01
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Huffman, Steve
Green, Christopher
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Huffman, Steve
Green, Christopher
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Ever-increasing globalization requires easy access to information about a diverse array of languages. While large amounts of information exist about the world’s languages, this information is spread across a variety of academic, pedagogical,and other sources. Further,users who are not specialized academic linguists may find existing resources and resource databases difficult to find and use. This talk introduces PASAGLOSSA, the result of an ongoing collaboration between the US Government and the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL). PASAGLOSSA is an interactive map-based language portal showing where all the known languages of the world are natively spoken. PASAGLOSSA is designed to be a user-friendly tool, providing users with varying levels of background and expertise easy access to language information and resources. PASAGLOSSA maps the languages of the world according to defined polygons that show known distributions of native speakers. This provides a visualization of the interaction of individual languages and language families. Each polygon is linked to a distinct ISO code that connects the users to disambiguated information on the language. Basic information is available for all 7,000 of the world’s languages; this includes: • The geographic and demographic information, including an estimate of the number of speakers, known dialects, and alternate names, for each of the world’s 7,000 languages; • Audio samples of over 3,000 of those languages; • Related languages, at any level of genetic similarity; • The national and official languages of each country of the world; • Access to a wiki interface displaying other language-specific enhancements. • An interactive language familiarization tool which allows users to test their aural recognition skills in a wide variety of languages. This talk will offer a demonstration of basic PASAGLOSSA features, highlighting the search capabilities and the technological infrastructure that provides the foundation for this tool. With this foundation in place, the PASAGLOSSA portal stands ready to be populated with a diverse array of world language data, including both scholarly and pedagogical resources.
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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