Language is a mean to communicate ideas, knowledge and express our cultural identity. To protect the legacy of our cultural heritage, language diversity needs to be sustained. Human language technology (HLT) can offer a lot to reduce the rate of language extinction. The focus of this paper is towards digital preservation of under-resourced languages. The discussion is apropos to the Indian languages; that almost all are under-resourced. The linguistic diversity of India is highlighted and its fate in this digital era is analyzed. This paper discusses the digital representation of the language and discusses HLT as a step towards preserving languages. Platform for online collection of speech is explained for gathering speech samples in three Indian languages; Hindi, Punjabi and Manipuri. The meta-data highlights the dialectal diversity of the speakers. These diversities have been analyzed acoustically for the Hindi speakers.
@InProceedings{SINHA18.17, author = {Shweta Sinha}, title = {Sustaining Linguistic Diversity Through Human Language Technology : A Case Study for Hindi}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Claudia Soria and Laurent Besacier and Laurette Pretorius}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-22-1}, language = {english} }
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