30.1122, Fund Drive: Creating Resources for Under-Represented Languages: Hakha Chin

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1122. Wed Mar 13 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1122, Fund Drive: Creating Resources for Under-Represented Languages: Hakha Chin

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Editor for this issue: Becca Morris <becca at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2019 16:24:23
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Fund Drive: Creating Resources for Under-Represented Languages: Hakha Chin

 Dear LINGUIST List readers and subscribers,

The theme for this year’s Fund Drive is Language Documentation and
Revitalization, because of this year’s theme, I thought we should start off by
telling you all about a language documentation and revitalization project that
is going on here at Indiana University: building an automatic speech
recognition (ASR) system for Hakha Chin.

Hakha Chin (Laiholh) is a language spoken in Myanmar/Burma with roughly
165,000 speakers, and there are more than 23,000 Burmese refugees who call
Indiana home with nearly 17,000 residing in Indianapolis. Last year Hakha Chin
was the language that was studied in the field methods classes taught by Dr.
Kelly Berkson. Since there are not many resources available for Hakha Chin,
the motivation behind this project is simple: having access to information in
your native language is not a privilege, but a right. This motivation has lead
to projects like using Mozilla Common Voice (https://voice.mozilla.org/en) for
Hakha Chin.

Mozilla Common Voice is a project whose aim is to “help make voice recognition
open and accessible to everyone”. They do this by having users donate their
voice and by listening to validate other submissions. Follow this link to see
the page for Hakha Chin (https://voice.mozilla.org/cnh).

The Hakha Chin Common Voice Project has gotten very pretty popular among the
Hakha Chin speaking community. Mentions of this project have appeared on the
Travel Myanmar YouTube channel and on the Chin Cable Network
(https://ccnchannel.net/). Below you can see our very own Dr. Berkson
discussing the work that is being done with Hakha Chin on the Travel Myanmar
YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/f39dFqqVIak?t=2).

Building an ASR system for Hakha Chin is not the only project going on at IU
for this language, there are multiple graduate students (myself included)
working on this language. For example, I am working on creating a Universal
Dependencies (https://universaldependencies.org/) treebank so that I can work
on Dependency Parsing for Hakha Chin.

To see some other cool things that are happening in the world of Language
Revitalization and Documentation be sure to check back on our blog and social
media pages, but most importantly, visit our Fund Drive page (https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/) 
– it is here where you can learn more about us and make a donation. Thank you for your
continued support.

Sincerely,
Becca Morris, on behalf of The LINGUIST List Team

(Sources: https://www.ethnologue.com/language/cnh, https://thebaci.org/)



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