Posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2017 by Will Hagle
Local Lingual
is an interactive map containing audio clips of people’s voices around the world.
Every once in a while, amidst the constant noise of social media and online news, a website comes along that reminds me of the web’s power to do simple, unique yet powerful things. Local Lingual is one of those sites. It’s basically just a map of the world, with the goal of showing visitors how people from various places around the world speak. When you click on a country, a column opens on the righthand side of the screen containing several audio clips of people’s voices from that country. The clips show you how various people from that country pronounce the country’s name — and, for most countries, a few words from the language.
Local Lingual goes beyond just native languages, also showing how people pronounce the names of certain countries in their own tongues. If you click on France, for instance, you’ll be shown how to pronounce that country’s name in Polish, Portuguese, and a host of other languages. The site doesn’t necessarily have any sort of practical purpose — you’re not going to learn a new language from visiting it (although there are Amazon affiliate links to language-learning books in the columns of every country). But you will learn something by browsing Local Lingual. If anything, the site is a reminder of how interesting and powerful the web can be as a tool for knowledge and connecting the world, even with an idea as simple as this.
