Mother Tongues Dictionaries — Reviews & Guides

Resource Type: Website

Pine, A. “Guides.” Mother Tongues Documentation. https://docs.mothertongues.org/docs/mtd-guides. Accessed May 2, 2023.

This multi-page documentation guide takes users through the process of setting up, building, and publishing a dictionary using Mother Tongues. Each section of the guide specifies the programs and software that users must be comfortable using and have installed on their computer before moving forward. The documentation is designed to accompany the mtd-starter GitHub repository, which is built with all the elements required to compile a Mother Tongues dictionary and set up with automated GitHub actions which build the dictionary as the users adds the required data.

These guides make Mother Tongues approachable to users without extensive prior programming experience, but do still require some knowledge of programming, or a desire to learn, to follow successfully.

This guide can be found here.

Resource Type: Academic Article

Carpenter, J., Chase, B., Chung, B., Humchitt R., and Turin, M. 2012. “Mobilizing and Activating Haíɫzaqvḷa (Heiltsuk Language) and Culture Through a Community-University Partnership.” KULA Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, 5(1):1-10.
https://kula.uvic.ca/index.php/kula/article/view/127.

Mobilizing and Activating Haíɫzaqvḷa (Heiltsuk Language) and Culture Through a Community-University Partnership

This article details the community-university partnership to help mobilize the large body of existing language documentation and revitalization materials created in and by the community to support broader community access through digital technologies. Mother Tongues Dictionaries was one of the digital tools used to support this work.

This article can be found here.

Resource Type: Academic Article

Littell, P., Pine, A., and Davis, H. 2017. “Waldayu and Waldayu Mobile: Modern Digital Interfaces for Endangered Languages.” Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, 141-150. https://aidanpine.ca/static/cv/pdfs/computel.pdf.

Waldayu and Waldayu Mobile:
Modern Digital Dictionary Interfaces for Endangered Languages

Abstract:

“We introduce Waldayu and Waldayu Mobile, web and mobile front-ends for endangered language dictionaries. The Waldayu products are designed with the needs of novice users in mind—both novices in the language and technological novices—and work in tandem with existing lexicographic databases. We discuss some of the unique problems that endangered language dictionary software products face, and detail the choices we made in addressing them.”

This article can be found here.

Note: This article introduces Mother Tongues under its former name, Waldayu.