Speaking of great online language resources, Wikilengua (a website devoted to Spanish language usage) has just launched a new oral linguistics atlas. Wikilengua defines itself as:

An open and participatory site for sharing practical information about the rules, usage and style of the Spanish language, and a medium for reflecting the diversity of a language spoken by hundreds of millions of people.

The oral atlas allows users worldwide to contribute sound recordings “to reflect a particular way of talking.” The Latin American Herald Tribune reports that “the purpose of the atlas is to let all Spanish-speakers contribute to compiling a record of the different ways the language is spoken, globally positioned on a map that uses Google Maps technology, to which new sound recordings can continually be added.”

In other words, an entirely new, interactive and global way to learn and participate in a language. This makes me think of potential applications in other fields, such as ethnomusicology (Bela Bartok must be rolling over in his grave…). What will the internet think of next?

Click here to access the oral atlas.

One of our project managers was scouring the web and ran into a great source we’d like to recommend. It called “Ethnologue,” an online encyclopedic database that catalogs “all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages.”

In its Statistical Summaries section, you can browse languages by world area, language size, language family and country. “This section steps back from the detail to offer a summary view of the world language situation.”

You can find the language log at www.ethnologue.com. Click here to go directly to the Statistics section.

Anyone who’s seen the box office hit Avatar and listened to the exotic-sounds of Pandora’s inhabitants might have wondered: where did that language come from?

“Na’vi,” as it’s called, is a constructed language (like Esperanto or Star Trek’s “Klingon.”) It was invented by University of Southern California professor Paul R. Frommer, commissioned by James Cameron to create a functioning language for the film. Frommer spent 4 years working on the grammar, vocab and sounds of the alien tongue, which currently contains a 1,000-word lexicon.

“The constraint, of course, is that the language I created had to be spoken by humans,” Frommer said. “I could have let my imagination run wild and come up with all sorts of weird sounds, but I was limited by what a human actor could actually do.”

“Cameron wanted something melodious and musical, something that would sound strange and alien but smooth and appealing.”

According to a LA Times article, the actors were less charmed—learning a truly alien language was one of the most difficult parts of their training.

To read more about the constructed Na’vi language in the LA Times, click here.