Dr Lau Chaak Ming Awarded a Grant from the Lord Wilson Heritage Trust
- 2021
- Research
- Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies
Dr Lau Chaak Ming
Dr Lau Chaak Ming from the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies has received funding from the Lord Wilson Trust Fund for his project titled “Digitalisation and Publication of Audio Storybooks for Hong Kong Indigenous Language: Hakka and Waitau” in 2021. The project approaches language revitalisation from a Digital Humanities perspective, and aims at producing digital and printed illustrated storybooks with audio recordings.
Hakka and Waitau are two endangered tongues used to be widely spoken in Hong Kong, and are in urgent need of revitalisation. By creating digital storybooks, we hope to help older speakers (grandparents) to pass on their languages to younger children, and encourage adults to re-learn their mother tongue. Hopefully this will slow down or even reverse the language-death process.
This project began in July 2021, and the plan is to publish at least 20 stories in Hakka and Waitau. The digital version of the storybooks will be made available to the general public for free to ensure the widest distribution.
