A website to raise awareness

Sorosoro created its website www.sorosoro.org in 2009 in order to raise awareness in regards to cultural and linguistic diversity issues among wide audiences internationally.

The necessity to preserve biodiversity has begun to reach beyond ecological circles, and we wish to draw attention to the fact that languages disappear in the very same way that animal and plant species become extinct every year: two processes that actually go hand in hand, and imply that a broader biocultural diversity is what nowadays faces the threats of decline.

Our website also intends to act as a bridge between the world of researchers and the world of non-experts who find interest in the subject. All too often the work of scientists and academics is only available to very limited audiences, and offers non-experts little to no access at all. The Internet is a space where information reaches a wider public and gives access to all scales of knowledge and interest, anywhere in the world.
Available in 3 languages (French, English and Spanish), it contains hundreds of articles and dozens of videos. It also includes interactive maps where are located 5,500 languages, an alphabet primer, a quiz, etc.

An informative website

“www.sorosoro.org” offers a unique web database including:

• Informative documentation: descriptive sheets of the near 120 spoken language families from around the world; an index of thousands of languages; articles by professional linguists and authors; ongoing updates on endangered languages; a glossary of linguistics for beginners; regular news; an agenda; a blog, etc.
• Videos available both on the website and on a Youtube channel, entitled SorosoroTV, offering videos edited through the Sorosoro research programs (in Africa and Latin America, so far), footage from our conferences, interviews of prominent figures on cultural and linguistic diversity issues, etc.
• Interactive maps showing where most of the world’s languages are spoken. Our very precise mapping system is able to locate over 5500 languages, either searched by continent, country, language group, etc.

Our website was designed for the general public as well as for students and researchers, and it may be used for educational purposes.

An interactive website

Internet users can take part in the ongoing evolution of the website.

Content contributions are welcome: complementary information on given languages, audiovisual documents, pictures, articles, testimonies, etc. Any kind of material that may help enriching the website will be considered.

The Sorosoro team will also be glad to answer Internet users’ requests, supply users with supplemental information when available, and even carry out research if necessary.

www.sorosoro.org intends to exist as a community of interest, a place of exchange where Internet users can have conversations, share their points of view, and react to the videos, comments, articles etc. hosted on our website.

A website with playful activities

A portion of our website is dedicated to more playful activities:

• Online quizzes are offered for users to test their knowledge on questions such as: “In which country is Mpongwe spoken? Indonesia, Mozambique, or Gabon?” ; “Which country in the world has the greatest linguistic diversity? Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, or Nigeria?” etc.

• The ABC book, stemming from a consultation among Internet users of the whole world, gives the translation of basic words and common expressions in dozens of languages.

  One might find out, for example, that words such as “thank you” or “hello” which seem so obvious to Westerners do not actually exist in all languages, as politeness may be expressed in a million different ways… In the same way, counting from 1 to 10 is far from being universal, as numerical concepts and systems vary from one culture to another; the phrase “Happy New Year” will reveal that January 1st does not necessarily mark the beginning of a new year! One may also learn how to say “I love you” in Miao, Welsh, Akele, or Araki…