Cleaning, Organizing, and Uniting Linguistic Databases (the CLOUD Project)

语言学家估计，在世界上目前使用的大约7000种语言中，近一半将在下个世纪内灭绝。这些语言中几乎没有得到很好的记录，但在过去的20年里，研究人员一直在与各种濒危语言的使用者合作，以保存这些语言所拥有的丰富数据。这些数据对于语言教育工作和对世界语言令人难以置信的多样性的语言研究来说是无价的。然而，不幸的是，这些数据大多存在于这些研究人员的个人文件中，对这种语言感兴趣的其他人无法访问，也不能以一种使数据能够轻松共享的形式。加拿大大学(Concordia和McGill)与哈佛大学的合作项目(清理、组织和联合语言数据库)正在为这个问题提供解决方案。该项目的主要目标是为语言数据创建一种新的通用数据格式，对这些数据进行集中的在线存储，以及一套相关的在线工具，使世界各地的用户能够更容易、更准确地收集、保存和共享语言数据。该项目将协助将以前收集的数据纳入这一新的格式，使第二语言学习者、想要保护其语言遗产的社区成员和其他语言和文化爱好者以及其他研究人员能够使用这些海量的语言数据(目前仅由专家使用)。关于更广泛的影响，该项目对于那些如果年轻一代不学习就有可能永远消失的语言也特别重要。对保留社区语言感兴趣的非语言学家(特别是社区成员)将能够使用该项目的在线工具来记录他们的语言，而不需要依赖专家。此外，该项目的课程创建应用程序将使用户能够创建许多濒危语言所缺乏的学习材料，并将支持社区努力向年轻一代教授他们的语言。

Of the approximately 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, linguists estimate that nearly half will be extinct within the next century. Very few of these languages have been well documented, but for the past two decades researchers have been working with speakers of a variety of endangered languages to preserve the rich data these languages possess. This data is invaluable for language education efforts and for linguistic research on the incredible diversity of the world's languages. Unfortunately, however, much of this data resides in the personal files of these researchers, inaccessible to others interested in the language, and not in a form that enables the data to be shared easily. The COULD project (Cleaning, Organizing, and Uniting Linguistic Databases), a partnership between Canadian universities (Concordia and McGill) and Harvard University, is offering a solution to this problem. The main goal of the project is to create a new universal data format for language data, centralized online storage for this data, and a set of related online tools which will allow users all over the world to collect, preserve, and share language data more easily and more accurately. The project will assist with the integration of previously collected data into this new format, enabling this vast amount of linguistic data (currently only being used by specialists) to be accessible to second language learners, community members who would like to preserve their linguistic heritage, and other language and culture enthusiasts, in addition to other researchers. With respect to broader impacts, the project is also of particular importance for those languages that are in threat of disappearing forever if the younger generations do not learn them. Non-linguists interested in preserving a community's language (especially members of the community itself) will be able to use the project's online tools to document their language without relying on experts. In addition, the project's lesson creation application will enable users to create learning materials, which are lacking for many endangered languages, and will support communities in their efforts to teach their language to younger generations.