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10 years, 1,800 survey sites: inside China’s hi-tech push to map linguistic diversity
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Meredith ChenPublished: 5:00pm, 29 Aug 2026Speak a few sentences of your hometown dialect into a microphone at a museum in central China, and a machine will pinpoint exactly where you are from.
The interactive voice-recognition booth is among star attractions at a new language resources hall that opened on Monday at the Hunan Museum in Changsha.
The hall showcases recordings and other language materials from Chinese dialects, minority languages and oral culture collected over the past decade. The compilation from more than 1,800 field survey sites nationwide reflects Beijing’s broader initiative to turn the vast digital archive of the country’s linguistic diversity into a public cultural resource.
The recordings represent 10 major Chinese dialects and more than 100 ethnic minority languages, including Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur and Zhuang, according to Chen Xuliang, deputy Communist Party secretary for the museum.
More than 30 language-related cultural relics are also on display. “Digital technology is helping to bring the results of language preservation research out of databases and into public cultural spaces,” Chen was quoted as saying by state news agency Xinhua.
Visitors can listen to local dialects, folk songs and recordings of some endangered languages, while interactive exhibits allow them to explore linguistic developments in China.
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