PHOTO: The Memory of the World experience on display at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. (Supplied: Canberra Museum and Gallery)
The Pacific is the most linguistically rich region in the world, with Papua New Guinea alone being home to a staggering 850 languages. Yet experts fear that widespread language loss could be the future for the region.
To draw attention to the issue, and to document more Pacific languages, Australian researchers are trialling a new way of making their database of languages more exciting and accessible.
To do this, they are turning to virtual reality technology.
“We’ve got this fantastic resource — a database of a thousand endangered languages,” lead researcher Dr Nick Thieberger from the University of Melbourne said.
“But it’s not very engaging, it’s a bit dull, so we wanted to do something to change that.”
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Source: ABC Australia