Affiliated Anthropology faculty member and Associate Research Scientist at Yale's South Asian Studies Council, Mark Turin, is the Principal Investigator on two new research grants, from Google and the British Council respectively.

Working with members of the Language Landscape team in London, Dr Turin is involved in an international research partnership to develop new methodologies and tools for language mapping. Languages are traditionally represented as polygons or points on maps, both of which can be inappropriate. Polygons can imply that a geographic area is home to a single homogeneous monolingual language group which is rarely the case, while choosing a single point to represent a speech community of any size--and certainly one that straddles a national borders--can be similarly problematic.

Funded by a Google Earth Developer Grant, the idea for this partnership grew out of an event convened by Dr Turin at the University of Cambridge in June 2012 entitled 'Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures'. Through the Google grant, the research team will develop user-friendly, online tools that will allow communities to map their own linguistic and cultural diversity.

A two-year grant from the British Council Transnational Education Partnership Programme will support Dr Turin to collaborate with researchers at the Karakorum International University (KIU) in Gilgit, Pakistan, to survey and document a number of endangered languages spoken in the Hindu Kush Himalaya. Working in partnership with Masters students and faculty at the Department of Modern Languages at KIU, Turin is developing a training module and fieldwork kit that can be used by local scholars who are committed to collecting and protecting their endangered oral literatures and spoken traditions. The first period of fieldwork is scheduled for the summer of 2013.

In early December 2012, Dr Turin will present a series of three broadcasts on linguistic diversity and the fate of some of the world's endangered languages that will be aired on BBC World Service Radio and Radio 4. Entitled 'Our Language in Your Hands', and based on research trips to Nepal, South Africa and the United States, podcasts of each episode will be made available online soon after transmission. For a short film on Dr Turin's work, made by the University of Cambridge, click here.