Archive of Endangered and Smaller Languages

My online archive of Endangered and Smaller Languages was funded by the British Academy and features short background descriptions and audio samples from my fieldwork on a variety of languages including Lekoudesch (Jewish Cattle Traders Jargon from the Black Forest area in Southwest Germany), Jenisch (in-group vocabulary of the itinerant showpeople of southern Germany), Ladino, Jiddish, Jewish Neo-Aramaic, North Frisian, Low German, Domari, Kurdish and Romani.

Dialects of Kurdish

The Dialects of Kurdish project, which I launched in 2012 at the University of Manchester, created the world’s largest accessible online comparative database on Kurdish based in fieldwork from over 150 locations in the Kurdish regions, carried out with the help of Kurdish language assistants and in collaboration with Salih Akin (Rouen) and Ergin Öpengin (Hewler/Erbil). The database was accessible on the University of Manchester website from 2016 until August 2022. It has since been made accessible via the Kratylos repository and can be searched here, as well as via the Aston University Forensic Linguistics Databank FOLD.

The project produced publications and student research dissertations documenting for the first time the Kurmanji dialects of northern Syria, and a flagship publication with Palgrave-Macmillan publishers on Structural and Typological Variation in the Dialects of Kurdish, which I co-edited with Geoffrey Haig and Ergin Öpengin. The project’s civic engagement included input into consultancy, in particular around the use of language analyses in asylum procedures.

In 2022 the University of Manchester disconnected the online Database of Kurdish Dialects, which had been funded by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. It has since refused to provide an explanation and failed to repond to dozens of messages from researchers and a wider community of users enquiring about its reasons to delete the resource.

Dialects of Arabic

The Dialects of Arabic project was a pilot initiative to create the world’s first online resources offering a systematic comparative overview of the structures of dialects in Arabic. The pilot was carried out with the help of research students specialising in the documentation and analysis of Arabic dialects working under my supervision at the University of Manchester, between 2015-2020. The resource produced a database based on an extensive questionnaire for which entries were obtained from speakers in some fifteen difference countries across the Arabic-speaking world. The project page and database was accessible via the University of Manchester web pages from 2016-2022 and is since accessible via the Kratylos repository. The data are also accessible via the Aston University Forensic Linguistics Databank FOLD.

The resource also includes information on the Arabic language community in Manchester, on the use of Arabic in Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin in asylum assessment procedures, as well as student theses written under my supervision at the University of Manchester.

In 2022 the University of Manchester disconnected the Arabic Dialects page. It has since refused to provide an explanation as to why it deleted the resource.

LinguaSnapp

LinguaSnapp is the world’s very first mobile app created in order to document linguistic landscapes. It allows registered users to take images on their mobile phones, tag them for key information (languages, scripts, outlet, arrangement and so on) and upload them onto a database, from where they are released onto an online map that displays the photos with their location and accompanying information, and can be filtered by any number of criteria. The resource was first introduced for Manchester in 2015 with tailored versions following for Melbourne, Jerusalem, Birmingham, Hamburg, St Petersburg and Tallinn. I created the concept for LinguaSnapp in 2015 and the design was implemented by the technical support team at the University of Manchester, with later localisations implemented by the technical support teams at the partner universities.

Romani Project

I founded and led the Romani Project at the University of Manchester between 1999-2017, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Open Society Foundations, the British Academy, the European Science Foundation, the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme, the Council of Europe, Manchester City Council, and Oldham Council. The project set up the Romani Morpho-Syntax database drawing on fieldwork and published sources, to date one of the most comprehensive dialectological databases on any language. The database was accessible on the University of Manchester web pages from 2006-2023. It has since been succeeded by the Database of Romani Dialects operated by a consortium of academic institutions.

The Romani Project also hosted a research project on Angloromani (the in-group variety of Romani Gypsies in English) which produced an online dictionary, and the collaborative projects Romlex (a comparative dictionary of Romani), RomIdent (on language standardisation and nation building in Romani), RomaniNet (an animated online language course for Romani) and MigRom (on the migrations of Romanian Roma to Western Europe), as well as producing audio-visual materials, scientific publications and student research. Project partners included the universities of Graz, Aarhus, Verona, Granada, and the Institute for Research on National Minorities in Cluj and Higher School for Social Sciences in Paris, the Council of Europe and European Roma and Travellers Forum, Manchester City Council and Oldham Council.

In 2023 the University of Manchester disconnected the Romani Project website including its online resources, links to bibliograpies and interactive resources, and the online databases on continental Romani dialects and British Angloromani. It has since refused to provide an explanation and failed to respond to dozens of enquiries from researchers and a wider community of users about its reasons to delete the resource. The University of Manchester has received research grants worth several millions of pounds for the Romani Project.

Manchester Working Group on Language Contact

The Manchester Working Group on Language Contact, which I founded at the University of Manchester in the early 2000s, brought together postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers working on a variety of language contact and bilingualism settings in East Asia, Europe and the Middle East including aspects of codeswitching, contact-induced change, and language policy. The group hosted an AHRC-funded project on Convergence and Linguistic Areas and produced a series of descriptive and theoretical publications on contact-induced grammatical change and the pragmatics of multilingual repertoire management.

In 2022 the University of Manchester disconnected all links to the contributions of students and postdoctoral researchers. It has refused to provide an explanation.

Multilingual Manchester

In 2010 I launched Multilingual Manchester (MLM) which I led until I left the University of Manchester in 2020. The project piloted an ambitious agenda of civic engagement, involving students in research and outreach, and adopted a new epistemology of research into urban multilingualism, where research questions were guided by the practical challenges that face practitioners, communities and public service providers in the multilingual city. MLM set up the world’s largest online archive of undergraduate student research devoted to the city’s multilingualism, a student volunteer scheme that supported local stakeholders, and a support platform for the city’s language supplementary schools. It created a mobile app, LinguaSnapp, to document linguistic landscapes and a Data Tool to compare statistical datasets on language use in institutions across the city, and launched a commercial consultancy service to support language analyses in asylum procedures as well as other forensic linguistic practice. Pursuing an agenda of direct and bold activism, MLM introduced a new mode of public engagement, campaigning on policy initiatives at local and national levels, setting the foundations for an international civic movement, and putting multilingualism firmly on the city’s public agenda. Aspects of the MLM model have been replicated in various universities around the world including Melbourne, Hamburg, Moscow, Sydney, Tallinn and Berlin. The project produced a series of publications by staff and postgraduate students theorising multilingual urban practice and policy with an emphasis on the negotiation of repertoires, agency and linguistic citizenship, as well as critical reflections on the civic engagement model and the risks of the corporate university’s impact and social responsibility agendas. MLM received a series of small grants from the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council as well as university strategic investment in support of its social responsibility agenda, as well as the promise of a major investment of £500k. It was also at the centre of Manchester’s successful bid to the Arts and Humanities Council’s Open World Research Initiative in 2016, and hosted the Manchester-based research strand of that project under my direction. The story of Multilingual Manchester is described in detail in my book Speech and the City: Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University (CUP, 2024).

The Multilingual Museum

In 2017-2018 I led a series of conversations with Manchester Museum about engagement with the city’s multilingualism. In 2019 I outlined a vision for a Multilingual Museum that was about more than just widening audiences: it was to put multilingualism on display as part of the city’s heritage and to offer a platform for continuous creative activity around language awareness. During the first Covid lockdown in 2020, as the museum closed its doors to visitors and moved some of its activities online, I initiated the Multilingual Museum digital platform: We approached local communities and invited them to contribute texts to an online resource in language varieties of their choice. I coined the concept ‘storied translation’: A mode of engagement with language that was dynamic and creative, involved various levels of language, written and spoken, and an interpretation and commentary as well as a rendering of content from a model text. My collaborators and I explained the concept in a blog post. A discussion of the model and participants’ experiences can be found in my paper on ‘Decolonising language in the city’. In September 2021 I wrote a project outline to expand the project in partnership with the newly founded group Manchester City of Languages. This was submitted by Manchester Museum in a bid to Heritage Fund. In 2023 the Multilingual Museum platform was re-launched acknowledging my contribution and the partnership with City of Languages.

Documentation of Zargari Romani in Iran

Zargari is a ‘missing link’ in the historical reconstruction of European Romani. The project, in collaboration with Ioana Aminian Jazi of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, seeks to document this endangered variety of Romani, to establish its historical-dialectological connections to the Balkan dialects of Romani and to assess its distinctive contact developments. A community-based project, it also aims to develop multi-modal language documentation technologies as a standard tool for smaller, lesser known and endangered language.

Documentation of the Dom language (Domari)

In the mid 1990s I reached out to the minority community of Dom community in the Old City of my home town of Jerusalem and began documenting their language – a Neo-Indic language with conservative traits in verb morphology and considerable influence from the contemporary contact language, Palestinian Arabic. This resulted in a series of publications (see my Publications page, and see also brief description as part of my Archive of Endangered and Smaller Languages). In 2021 I was approached by Kamal Kelzi, a speaker of the Dom language of Aleppo, and together we began to document the speech of the Aleppo Dom, a community that has become disperesed across various countries since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011. Our collaboration has resulted to far in a Preliminary Sketch of the language, in preparation of a monograph length study. Together with Moe Kitamura we have set up a website devoted to the Dom Language with an archive of publications and resources including audio samples with transcriptions.