<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif;font-size:large"><h1 style="margin:2px 0px 4px;padding:0px;font-size:29px;font-weight:normal;line-height:1.5;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0)">
US linguists' web map preserves China's dialects</h1><p class="" style="margin:0px 0px 5px;padding:0px;line-height:16px;font-size:11px;color:rgb(78,78,78);font-family:Verdana"><span style="float:left">01-26-2014 10:42 BJT</span><span style="float:left"><br>
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BEIJING, Jan. 26 (Xinhuanet) -- Thousands of variations of Chinese are spoken in the vast nation and two Americans have created a unique online map of Chinese dialects, featuring 10 major dialects and 300 stories so far.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;padding:0px 0px 16px;line-height:20px;font-size:12px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Verdana">Kellen Parker and Steve Hansen launched Phonemica (<a href="http://phonemica.net">phonemica.net</a>) in May 2012 to collect and preserve disappearing dialects. Other websites are devoted to dialects but this gathers them in one place.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;padding:0px 0px 16px;line-height:20px;font-size:12px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Verdana">“The website is for archiving the stories and dialects for future generations, so that in 30 years people can know what their grandparents lives were like,” Keller told Shanghai Daily in a recent interview through email.</p>
<p style="margin:0px;padding:0px 0px 16px;line-height:20px;font-size:12px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Verdana">Parker and Hansen are looking for volunteers to tell stories themselves and to find and record other storytellers, especially older people, to build their archive and preserve dying local speech. Most of it now is crowd-sourced.</p>
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