Speaker
Description
the Jejueo Talking Dictionary, a free online
multimedia database and Android application.
Jejueo is a critically endangered language spoken
by 5,000-10,000 people throughout Jeju Province,
South Korea, and in a diasporic enclave in Osaka,
Japan. Under contact pressure from Standard
Korean, Jejueo is undergoing rapid attrition
(Kang, 2005; Kang, 2007), and most fluent
speakers of Jejueo are now over 75 years old
(UNESCO, 2010). In recent years, talking
dictionaries have proven to be valuable tools in
language revitalization programs worldwide
(Nathan, 2006; Harrison and Anderson, 2006).
As a collaborative team including linguists from
Jeju National University, members of the Jejueo
Preservation Society, Jeju community members
and outside linguists, we are currently building a
web-based talking dictionary of Jejueo along with
an application for Android devices. The Jejueo
talking dictionary will compile existing annotated
video corpora of Jejueo songs, conversational
genres and regional mythology into a multimedia
database, to be supplemented by original
annotated video recordings of natural language
use. Lexemes and definitions will be
accompanied by audio files of their pronunciation
and occasional photos, in the case of items native
to Jeju. The audio and video data will be tagged
in Jejueo, Korean, Japanese and English so that
users may search or browse the dictionary in any
of these languages. Videos showing a range of
discourse types will have interlinear glossing, so
that users may search Jejueo particles as well as
lexemes and grammatical topics, and find the
tools to construct original Jejeuo speech. The
Jejueo talking dictionary will serve as a tool for
language acquisition in Jejueo immersion
programs in schools, as well as a repository for
oral history and ceremonial speech. The aim of
this paper is to discuss how the interests of
diverse user communities may be addressed by
the methodology, organization and scope of
talking dictionaries.
