Creating a Brezhoneg Living Dictionary

Brezhoneg Living Dictionary

​Breizh Amerika is partnering with Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to create a Brezhoneg Living Dictionary. 

​The Brezhoneg Living Dictionary will contain hundreds of words and phrases in the Brezhoneg language as well as translations into French and English, and will serve as an online reference tool for language learners throughout the Breton diaspora.

Being a search-driven and easily discoverable free tool, a Living Dictionary does well beyond a static print dictionary by including audio recordings by fluent speakers, engaging images and videos. The Brezhoneg Living Dictionary addresses the urgent need to provide comprehensive, freely accessible, and easy-to-navigate tech tools that can assist communities working on the revitalization of Breton language and culture around the world.

The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages is on a mission to ensure language survival for generations to come. They support communities who are safeguarding their languages from extinction through activism, education, and technology.

Their research teams document endangered languages and cultural practices, publish scientific studies, run digital training workshops to empower language activists, and collaborate with communities to create language resources such as Living Dictionaries that will serve as a basis for language revitalization.
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Living Dictionaries, collaborative multimedia web tools

Led by activists and linguists around the globe, Living Dictionaries are collaborative multimedia online tools that can help languages survive for generations to come. Ideal for maintaining indigenous as well as diaspora languages, Living Dictionaries are never out-of-print, infinitely expandable resources. They go well beyond a static print dictionary by combining language data with digital audio recordings of speakers, photos and videos. The intended audience of this web platform is inclusive, diverse and multilingual.

Between 2005 and 2019, we worked in over 100 endangered language communities worldwide, doing fieldwork and creating trusting relationships with community members. Since 2020, we have provided free assistance to more than 300 language activists in 25+ countries around the world through online training webinars during the time of COVID-19. In all, we have assisted in the creation of close to 400 Living Dictionaries. Many of these dictionaries are still under construction and may only contain a handful of entries, whereas others have been developed by teams over the course of many years and contain anywhere from 1k to 10k entries. 

The Living Dictionaries web platform is a work-in-progress and has a long-term goal of helping to safeguard 3,000+ endangered languages by building dictionaries for them over the next 30+ years. All linguistic and cultural data stored on the platform belongs to the language communities themselves, and dictionary managers can use a convenient "Export" feature to download their text data and multimedia at any time. The Living Tongues team offers guidance, technical support and free training for all citizen-linguists working on the platform. We prioritize supporting dictionaries that are stewarded by community members who wish to see their languages thrive online. 
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Building a Brezhoneg Living Dictionary

​Breizh Amerika, a non-profit organization, works tirelessly to increase awareness of Breton culture, language, and film to global audiences. We are very excited to be working on building a Brezhoneg Living Dictionary to bring greater awareness to Breton language, which UNESCO has called severely endangered. 

Brezhoneg, also known as Breton, is an endangered Southwestern Brittonic (Brythonic) tongue that is part of the Celtic language family. It is currently spoken by thousands of people in Brittany, France, and is undergoing a revival thanks to grassroots efforts to increase visibility and educational opportunities for the language in France and in the Breton diaspora around the world.

Breizh Amerika will work over the coming weeks with organizations like Dizale to build The Brezhoneg Living Dictionary which will contain hundreds of words and phrases in the Brezhoneg language. 

If you are interested to learn more, send us an email : [email protected]

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