Helsinki, Espoo, Finland, October 2016 – ongoing
Language Contact is a dictionary made for and by people. It’s a sort of worldwide “false friends” dictionary.
It’s an open project, everyone can contribute adding new words or correcting any mistakes.
In a multicultural environment, it happens very often to listen languages that we don’t know. If we try to pay attention to those unknown sounds, it seems that our ears are trying to shape them, in order to understand what people are saying. Of course, if we are not able to speak a language, we can either to guess what people are really saying or, maybe, we can play with the sound and make it similar to our own language or other languages that we know, in order to make sense of it or twist the real meaning of the conversation. Sometimes it’s interesting to compare different words in different languages, even if they don’t really seem to have something in common. Occasionally, we have words in different languages that are pronounced in a similar way, even if they are written differently & sometimes words are written in a similar way, but the pronunciation is different. This project could be a funny way to see how different and similar languages can be, simultaneously.
Let’s think about this as an amusing game.
>Facebook  >Audio Archive  >Android App
Lists of words
Full list of words, Afrikaans, Albanian, American English, Australian, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Norwegian, Nyanja, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Western Frisian, Yoruba.
Helsinki, Espoo, Finlandia, Ottobre 2016 – in corso
Language Contact è un dizionario in grado di comparare parole simili in lingue diverse, promuovendo il concetto di multilinguismo. Il progetto, nato ad ottobre 2016, comprende una pagina facebook, un archivio audio & un’app per Android.
>Facebook  >Archivio Audio  >App x Android
In un ambiente multiculturale, capita spesso di ascoltare lingue che non conosciamo. Prestando attenzione a suoni sconosciuti con cui è possibile venire in contatto, sembrerebbe proprio che le nostre orecchie provino a modellarli, in modo da comprendere la conversazione. Certamente, se non siamo capaci di parlare una lingua, possiamo sia supporre quello che le persone dicono o, magari, giocare con quel suono e renderlo simile ad un suono della nostra stessa lingua o di altre che conosciamo, così da comprendere o ribaltare completamente il reale significato della conversazione. Language Contact è un progetto che per esistere necessita del continuo contributo degli utenti della rete e della realtà .
