Phonemica

Phonemica is a project to preserve spoken stories in local vernaculars. We believe that each language and dialect is a priceless cultural treasure embedding history, social customs - the knowledge of a people. Phonemica began as an exploration of Chinese, the singular language family behind which is hidden dozens or even hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages, both in greater China and in Chinese-speaking communities around the world. In April 2013 the site was launched with the goal of collecting stories from every village and every neighborhood where Chinese is spoken, both in China and abroad. That goal today remains the same. But since April 2014, the scope has expanded to allow non-Sinitic languages. Clearly, China is not just Chinese, and Chinese is not just in China. The new website infrastructure makes it possible to include recordings from mainland China minority group languages, Taiwanese indigenous languages, and so on - in theory any language group. In the future we will be working with specialists in other languages to create localized versions for other language groups.