Amazon Voices

Vanuatu Voices and West Papuan Voices are projects developed by interdisciplinary teams at MPI-EVA. These databases feature phonetically transcribed primary recordings from numerous villages on different islands to document and showcase the wide variation and diversity of languages spoken in that region of the world. The Amazon is also known for its linguistic diversity. Using the same methods, wordlists, and archiving protocols developed in the Vanuatu Voices project, we aim to build the first version of Amazon Voices, a database comprising phonetically transcribed recordings of Amazonian languages. In this dataset version, we intend to cover at least 30-35 Amazonian languages. Most recordings will be conducted at the Chana field station (see Line 1). Under suitable conditions, we hope to collect data from languages in Amazonian regions of neighboring countries. Funded by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Research Areas: Computational Linguistics, Databases, and Language Technologies; Linguistic Revitalization, Description, and Documentation of Endangered Languages.