Manchu/Sibe
Since 2021, I have been collaborating with speakers of Sibe, a dialect of Manchu (Tungusic: China) to develop documentation materials for the speaker community. This work, conducted remotely with speakers in China, is ongoing, and has culminated in resources including:
- A Sibe-Mandarin-English dictionary, with audio recordings
- An introductory phrasebook of the language, also with audio recordings
- A video archive of authentic language material (featuring collaborations with a few YouTubers)
- Other digital resources such as a romanization-to-IPA converter and a verb conjugation tool
Jewish Languages (Judeo-Iranian, Jewish Neo-Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic)
Owing to my Jewish-Ukrainian heritage, I sought to apply my documentation experience in Manchu/Sibe to languages, mostly endangered, spoken by Jews across the world. From November 2021 to June 2022, I served as an inter-organizational intern with the Jewish Language Consortium. Specifically, I worked to bridge documentation initiatives related to endangered Jewish languages across the following nonprofit organizations:
- Wikitongues, where I maintained and collected metadata for Jewish language videos in the organization's documentation archive
- Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, where I performed outreach and established the foundations for the creation of a recorded dictionary for Jewish Neo-Aramaic
- HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project, where I coordinated the filming, processing, and dissemination of more than 10 interviews, songs, plays and other cultural videos — featuring speakers of endangered Jewish languages (see bottom right)