LinguaNabanga is a digital dictionary that has been designed to showcase the interaction between culture, language, and nature. Originally designed to provide ethnobotanical data, it provides species name, use information (or anthropological note), and use category (for ease of searching), but it has been vastly expanded to serve many other kinds of data.
Open LinguaNabanga digital dictionary app
Much of LinguaNabanga content is based on our book Plants, People and Culture in Tafea Province
LinguaNabanga is a free, open-access web app (that can be downloaded once and then can be used offline without the need of an internet connection). It provides multi-access filters and search tools to narrow or find entries (through free text or defined categories), including fuzzy search tools to deal with the lack of standardized orthographies. Tags are also provided to flag archaic words (which have largely fallen out of use) and loan words from other languages.
Entries include Indigenous names of plants, animals, and many other objects and terms, with local spellings and recordings by local speakers. Scientific names are tied to specimens, each illustrated using photos; photos also illustrate other objects. Explanatory notes provide information on uses of plants, animals, and other objects, as well as guidance for word use, parts of speech, semantic categories, and word origin (etymology). Usage examples are also provided. For each dictionary entry, anthropological entry, and recording, credit is provided to the local person(s) who serves as the data source. Additional materials include recorded and transcribed stories, posters for developing educational materials.