OpenSpeaks

Half of the world’s languages are in danger!

At OpenSpeaks, we are working with communities to co-design open resources for indigenous, endangered and other marginalised languages.

Resources

LEARN
from toolkit for language digital activists

CONSENT, COPYRIGHT & OPEN LICENSING
MULTIMEDIA RECORDING GUIDE
METADATA COLLECTION & PUBLICATION
ACCESSIBILITY MORE ▶︎

CONTRIBUTE
*to *Wikiversity with more resources & translations

****OpenSpeaks was originally incubated inside Wikimedia Commons—Wikipedia’s sister project. Like all open projects, it is now maintained by the Wikiversity (another Wikipedia sister project) volunteer community. You can add relevant information, resources and translations.

EXPLORE +

Supported by

National Geographic Society grant, 2017

Creative Commons CAF grant

Mozilla Open Leadership Series Round 5, 2017

MJ Bear Fellowship 2017, Online News Association

Documentaries made using OpenSpeaks Framework

Gyani Maiya

TRAILER | Language: Kusunda

All her tribespeople left the nomadic life — to settle in villages — and their mother tongue Gi Mihaq. Who will keep the language alive?

Mage Porob

TRAILER | Language: Ho

Mage Porob brings everyone home no matter how far they are. None can stay at home when the dumeng is beaten, .

OpenSpeaks in conferences

Mozilla Festival 2021

Creative Commons Global Summit 2019, Lisbon, Portugal

Wikimania 2019, Stockholm, Sweden

Celtic Knot 2018, Wales, UK

Mozilla Festival 2018, London, UK

Publications and news coverage

Building a Public Domain Voice Database for Odia

[Journal article] A Companion Proceeding of presentation at the Web Conference 2022 that details the background of building the largest voice data for the Odia language.

Young people, social inclusion and digitalisation. Emerging knowledge for practice and policy

[Chapter in the Youth Knowledge book] We contributed a Chapter (no. 6) titled “Can openness and open standards help revitalise marginalised languages?”.

UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2020

Joined panel “Data to Inclusion: Building datasets in African Languages” to share use of Openness for protection of indigenous languages and higher focus on digital rights of communities.

Creative Commons Global Summit 2020

An interactive session on “building consent from bottom up” for open culture and open licensing, and a discussion on “How social justice initiatives can further Creative Commons“.

UNESCO organises workshop on strengthening multilingualism through datasets in low resourced languages at IGF 2021

We underlined in this panel for growing digital rights knowhow among indigenous groups, more media and information literacy, protection of indigenous knowledge and ensuring for (indigenous) community agency on research outcomes involving them.

O Foundation and National Geographic set out to document endangered languages before they are lost forever

[News feature] “Through this initiative, the team is attempting to document the almost-forgotten languages of India. What’s more? They have received a grant from National Geographic to specifically document three to four endangered languages of South Asia.”