Stimmen: A citizen science approach to minority language sociolinguistics

This paper presents the project Stimmen fan Fryslan 'Voices of Fryslan'. The project relies on a smartphone application developed to involve local communities in the creation of speech corpora, particularly of lesser used languages. This paper lays out the scientific and societal context of the project, showcases the smartphone application and gives an overview of the results from the project that attracted more than 15,000 users. Some key methodological issues are considered, and the paper discusses the role of smartphone technology for citizen science in minority language areas while also showing new maps with distributions of lexical and phonological variation in Frisian.

Automated summary

This paper introduces the project Stimmen fan Fryslan 'Voices of Fryslan', which aims to involve local communities in creating speech corpora through a smartphone application. The results of the project, which attracted over 15,000 users, are discussed along with key methodological issues, and new maps showing distributions of lexical and phonological variation in Frisian are presented. The role of smartphone technology in citizen science in minority language areas is also explored.