Case Study: Larrakia Nation preserves its language with Appen

Preserving Language Through Useable Data and Phonetic Annotation

Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation of People partnered with Appen to preserve the Larrakia language by improving a fragmented database of text and audio samples. The challenge was that the text and audio databases were not linked, the text contained errors, and the data was difficult to navigate, isolate by speaker or language, and use reliably for long-term language teaching and archiving.

Appen helped align the databases, enrich metadata, add finer-grained time stamps, label speaker roles and language segments, and provide phonetic annotation and acoustic measurements for Larrakia vowels and consonants. The result was a more usable, sustainable language database with a longer shelf life, supporting future preservation and teaching efforts; while the project is ongoing, Appen and Dr. Mark Harvey have laid the foundation for a database that can still be accessed and understood decades from now.

Larrakia Nation

Mark Harvey

Linguist