#humanswhoreadgrammars

[superlinguo]

The Great Language Game became The Great Language Experiment (and it has a sequel!)

In 2013 Melbournian Lars Yencken developed The Great Language Game. The aim of the game was to listen to snippets of audio and guess the language. I wrote about it at the time:

It’s great fun - and even if you stumble the first few times, you’ll find the clips repeat, so you can ‘get your ear in’ so to speak. The Fully (Sic) team have all had a go - I failed to make use of the whole recording and largely struck out thanks to my own impatience.

I particularly wanted to plug it because Yencken is a Melbournian, but also because the recordings are all drawn from the amazing diversity of languages available on SBS radio here in Australia. SBS is amazing and this game is a nice way of sharing some of that diversity!

It was (and still is!) a great deal of fun, and attracted a large and engaged set of players. Four years later and Yencken teamed up with Hedvig Skirgård (of @humanswhoreadgrammars) and Seán G. Roberts (of Replicated Typo) to publish a paper looking at the results of The Great Language Game to see which languages are confused for others.

It is probably the largest linguistics experiment ever analyzed with 15 million guesses from 400 audio recordings of 78 languages

If you played the great language game, you contributed to the findings from this paper. Some of the findings, as noted by Seán in a summary post on Replicated Typo:

We found that languages are more likely to be confused if they are:

Geographically close to each other;

Similar in their phoneme inventories

Similar in their lexicon

Closely related historically (but this effect disappears when controlling for geographic proximity)

You can now play LingQuest, a sequel to The Great Language Game

Seán Roberts and Hedvig Skirgård  have teamed up with Peter Withers (designer of the excellent KinOath), to design LingQuest. From the LingQuest page:

LingQuest is a game that helps the player discover the similarities and differences in the world’s languages. Players listen to recordings and must match speakers of the same language.  They find out about where languages are spoken and how many speakers a language has. The game includes over 70 languages from the most common to endangered languages from the DOBES Archive (Documentation of Endangered Languages) from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. LingQuest is available for free in the App Store and online — click here to start playing immediately.

There goes the rest of the day for me!

#language #linguistics #tumblinguists #langblr #hwrg #sounds #phonetics #perception #the great language game #online #paper #research #big data

[laserhedvig]

Yep, so Humans Who Read Grammars have moved to a regular blog on blogger. The posts will still automagically spread to tumblr, twitter and Facebook.

So, don't you worry child! Also: Hurray!

p.s. before you ask, no I haven't had time to look up what the Japanese says in the Lady Gaga-gif above. I just love the gif either way, but please enlighten me if you do know.

#humanswhoreadgrammars #linguistics #linguisticdiversityhellyeah