Event language
UI language
For many of the world’s 7000 languages, a ‘digital presence’ means a static bilingual wordlist. This fails to capture a language’s grammatical structure, its oral heritage, and its capacity to function as a primary language of thought in the digital age. Dagbanli, a Gur language spoken by over 3 million people in Northern Ghana and Togo, exemplifies this gap. This session chronicles the creation of the Dagbanli Dictionary: a free, open-source, offline- platform that is actively restoring digital sovereignty to the language. We will demonstrate how the dictionary moves beyond translation by integrating: * Wikidata and Open Data: Built entirely on structured open data from Wikidata Lexemes * Oral Preservation: A custom-built audio pipeline incorporates over 20,000 native-speaker recordings from Mozilla Common Voice and the University of Ghana HCI Lab, preserving pronunciation, tonal nuance, and visual context (images). * Offline-First Architecture: Designed for equitable access, the Progressive Web App (PWA) allows offline use on a smartphone after a one-time download, bridging infrastructure gaps. Participants will see live demos of the dictionary, learn how the data flows from Wikidata to browser, and understand how they can fork the entire open-source project for their own language.
You need to log in before contacting the organizer.
