Latest news on Icelandic, Faroese and Greenlandic

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  1. Icelandic
    As many of you know, the 60 mini-stories have been completed and Icelandic will be added to LingQ after Version 5.0 has been released. The main thing would be to get more Icelandic material into LingQ once it has been released. I will add some which I´ll read myself, but I really hope LingQ users will be willing to help so we can get that critical mass to make Icelandic really viable and interesting to learn here, for users of all levels. Fortunately, I have found a site with open audio books (text and sound), which we can hopefully all work together on getting into LingQ:

  1. Faroese
    Work is in progress on the 60 mini-stories there, because luckily I found a good leader for the project who has his students in Faroese translate them as homework and then he corrects their translations. They have partially or fully translated 48 of the stories, but many need to be corrected. We do not know when the recording will start. Another uncertainty is the audio translations. Faroese is not available in Google Translate for example. We will look into what options are out there (I did hear something about there perhaps being a company having made a Faroese speech synthesizer, which needs investigating) but Faroese may end up being added without that feature. It is very hard to estimate when it will be ready on LingQ. We expect the Faroese team to finish it sometime next year and LingQ 5.0 will probably have been published before that, but then Icelandic, if it hadn´t been added already, would be ahead of it in the line - possibly along with some other languages.

  2. Greenlandic
    Greenlandic is actually 3 languages, West, East and North, of which West-Greenlandic is spoken by the most people by far. It is still a very “small” language, spoken by even fewer people than Faroese. I did reach out to a few select people in Nuuk, such as language teachers and representatives of cultural institutions, as well as Greenlandic diplomats in Reykjavik, about getting West-Greenlandic into LingQ. I am not overly optimistic about this, sadly enough, since a large part of them did not reply. The ones who did and said it was a good idea, do not really have the means to do anything, except try to push the idea again with the ones who didn´t reply to me yet. It´s something that I don´t think I´ll pursue much, since it´s a bit out of my reach and I feel I can be of more use adding Icelandic material. A bit sad since this language is in a much greater danger of dying out than either Icelandic or Faroese and adding it to LingQ would be a powerful move to help people with the possibility of learning it. If any of you know Greenlanders, it certainly can´t hurt to make them aware of this possibility.

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Speaking of Greenlandic dying out, I know this has nothing to do with the post per se but there is a Greenlandic band called, Nanook that sings in Greenlandic.

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Yes there are bands and artists who sing in Greenlandic and some mix traditional Greenlandic drumdance in with their music.

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Greenlandic would obviously also have the limitalimitation that it is not available in Google Translate and I doubt very much there is any speech program/synthesizer for it.

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It does have text to speech! It’s called Martha: Martha – Oqaasileriffik

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That is good to know. Thank you for letting me know about it.

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Thanks again for this, because I checked it out and found out I know someone who works for the institute that made Martha https://oqaasileriffik.gl/ That means I have a contact there I can talk with directly, which might help.

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There is a Faroese speech synthesizer that exists and I found it. I have not idea whether LingQ could use it though, since among other things, they might charge more for it than LingQ would pay etc.

Text to speech demo: type and talk solutions | Acapela Group (and then choose Faroese from the dropdown list)

I know some Faroese people are working on another Faroese speech synthesizer, but they told me it would probably take another year before it´s ready. That one would be open source and free, which should mean LingQ would use it to make Faroese more feature complete when the time comes.

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I got a notification where it looked like someone commented on this post, saying Greenlandic isn´t in immediate danger of going extinct, but the post seems to have been removed by the poster. I think that statement is definitely true. It´s certainly not in an immediate danger of dying out. The danger, just like for Icelandic and Faroese, is more in the long run. East-Greenlandic and perhaps North-Greenlandic are also in much more danger than West-Greenlandic, but I doubt they could be added to LingQ.

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I definitely appreciate the work you have put in here! When Icelandic (finally) becomes available I will definitely get content in! Though I will likely start taking it more seriously towards the end of 2021 as I am trying to reach a comfortable, high level in my existing target languages before looking at any further languages.

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I don´t really know much about Sami and don´t really know any Sami people. Who knows though, there might even be some Sami people on LingQ. Otherwise, if there are people here from Norway, Finland, Sweden or even Russia, it´s possible they would know some Sami people and know more about the Sami languages and how to get them into LingQ.

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Maybe you can make a thread here asking about Sami languages?

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I did finally reach Oqaasileriffik, the Greenlandic language institute and they do not themselves have the time/resources to translate and read the 60 mini-stories, because of other work they need to do, although they said it´s possible there might be someone else out there who could do it. They also pointed out how Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language, which would make the known words and LingQs features in LingQ pretty useless. That´s because “words” in Greenlandic are more like small sentences or half-sentences, so you could read hundreds of pages and still have almost nothing but blue “words” in LingQ - as they put it themselves. I sort of knew that, but maybe not to the extent they pointed out.

It would still help to have it in LingQ, just not as much as with European languages for example and it would certainly help to have the mini-stories translated and read, even if one didn´t use them in LingQ.

What I will do is I will probably try to poke a couple of people in Greenland just to let them know about this possibility, but then I think I´ll call it quits. There will be a few people in Greenland who´ll know about this possibility and perhaps they will spread the word a bit and someone might pick up the ball. Time will tell.

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