Researchers from the Melbourne School of Engineering are
travelling to remote Papua New Guinea to trial a mobile app that
will document and preserve the region’s unique dialects;
languages that are at critical risk of being lost forever. The
project is being led by Associate Professor Steven Bird from the
Department of Computing and Information Systems. Papua New
Guinea has over 800 distinct languages, around one third of the
world’s indigenous tongues. This linguistic and cultural
treasure is at risk of being lost as the languages fall out of
use. “Now is the time to record and translate the stories and
songs, so they can be heard and understood by future
generations.” Associate Professor Bird said. “The best way to do
this on a large scale is to use mobile phones. They are already
in widespread use, even in villages without electricity, where
they are recharged using car batteries.” Doctoral student,
Florian Hanke, developed the software for Android phones, which
is capable of recording audio and sharing it