Lingua Libre

A language recording project
powered by Wikimédia France
	Lingua Libre 2020 Coolest Tool; Award Winner in the category ; Diversity
Information
Website	lingualibre.org
Started in	2015
Statistics
Recordings	+1,400,000
Languages	+315
Speakers	+3,800
Contact
Wikimedia France	Adélaïde Calais WMFr, Rémy Gerbet WMFr
Community	Yug, Pamputt

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Lingua Libre is a project developed by Wikimédia France, which aims to build a collaborative, multilingual, audiovisual corpus under free licence in order to:

Expand knowledge about languages and in languages in an audiovisual way on the web, on Wikimedia projects and outside;
Support the development of online language communities — particularly those of poorly endowed, minority, regional, oral or signed languages — in order to help communities accessing online information and to ensure the vitality of the languages of these communities.

Why?

The lack of diversity and orality in Wikimedia projects and on the web in general limit the ability of Internet users to communicate and contribute online to various web platforms where they cannot find content and communities sharing their language. Among the regional minority languages that are oral or signed, they threaten in particular the poorly endowed ones, many of which are currently in danger of extinction and for whom inclusion on the web is a major challenge and opportunity. Indeed, of the 7,000 languages in existence today, it is estimated that only 2,500 will survive to the next century and only 250 (less than 5%!) will make their digital ascent, a factor which is yet essential for their vitality. Current initiatives by linguists and activists to document and share data, resources and content online in endangered languages do not directly contribute to the development of a digitally-ascendant linguistic community of Internet users, and thus remain limited in their impact.

Lingua Libre aims to make up for this lack of support by offering an online solution for mass recording, leading to the publication of a collaborative multilingual audiovisual corpus under free licence, whose aim is to document and to revitalize languages by triggering the contribution of new language communities on Lingua Libre and then outside.

How?

Lingua Libre is a tool that allows to record a large number of words in a few hours (up to 1,000 words/hour with a clean word list and an experienced user). It automatizes the classic procedure for recording and adding audio-visual pronunciation files onto Wikimedia projects. Once the recording is done, the platform automatically uploads clean, well cut, well named and apps-friendly audio files, directly to Wikimedia Commons.

Classic audio recording workflow
Audio recording workflow with Lingua Libre

Established partnerships

The DGLFLF: (General Delegation for the French language and the languages of France), part of the Ministry of Culture in France
Lo Congrès: The permanent congress of the Occitan language
The Maison de la Nouvelle-Calédonie à Paris: (House of New Caledonia in Paris), which represents New Caledonia in Metropolitan France
The OLCA: Office for the Language and Cultures of Alsace and Moselle
Plateforme Atlas: an association aiming to promote and facilitate access to culture, humanities and arts, in any language (contact)

Initiatives involving Lingua Libre

Do you have a project that uses LinguaLibre? Link it below to celebrate itǃ

Recordingː

University of French Guiana
WikiLinguila
Languages of Cameroon
Odia project
Workshops by a library in Strasbourg during the European Heritage Days 2021-2023
Using the corpus of recordings for other projects:
SRPP: Using Crowd-Sourced Data and Automatic Alignment to Investigate the Phonetics and Phonology of Less-Resourced Languages

Community

To join us, simply add your name in the volunteers list, with * ~~~.

Core team

Core team members (2024) with deep knowledge of the project, they can guide you to resources and know-how best suited for your action.
Volunteer members are involved almost daily on LinguaLibre.

Yug: Facilitator / community liaison, events speaker, developer, bot master, SignIt, Github. Administrator on Lingualibre.org.
Pushkar7077: Lingua Libre Django's lead developer.
WikiLucas00: Discord administrator. Bureaucrat on Lingualibre.org.
Ardzun: Indonesian languages project.

Recent staff

Staff members at Wikimedia France and elsewhere equally do important work.

Xavier Cailleau WMFr: Facilitator / community liaison, events speaker, grants requests.
Michael Barbereau WMFr: Developer, servers manager.
Hugo en résidence: Developer, Google Summer of Code 2024 mentor.

Join the discussions

Commons Chat Room Discord Server

Phabricator GitLab