MY LANGUAGE - THE TSAKONIAN
PRIMARY SCHOOL OF LEONIDIO
The Tsakonian language is included in the UNESCO’s catalogue with endangered languages, a language with roots in the Ancient Doric dialect and one of the oldest spoken languages (along with the Pontiac one) in Greece. Nowadays, in the tsakonian area, there are still elders and a few adults who still speak and preserve this language.
At the Primary School of Leonidio, through this programme, the opportunity to present suitable incentives to students in order to learn Tsakonian and at the same time to lay solid foundations for the recording of its words, its oral documentation, the development of computational linguistic applications and dictionary production and the use of language tools for this specific language in the computing environment, is given. The Dictionary will be in an Online form and able to work with tools that will be developed independently for its learning.
The Tsakonian region is the area defined from Leonidio to Agios Andreas (a total of 12 villages).In this region, a linguistic dialect based on the Ancient Doric, the Tsakonian, is spoken. At the Primary School of Leonidio there is a timeless effort to preserve the language, to have students learn it, and to record it.
In our everlasting effort, we deemed necessary the scientific recording of the words of the Tsakonian language in the form of a dictionary with both morphological and audio documentation of it. The material produced can be used in the learning process through the development of computational linguistic applications not only for its use by students in order to produce written texts but also for further scientific research by expert scientists.
The students, during the process of completing and editing the existing database, came into contact with older people speaking the Tsakonian language, in all the region spoken, and recorded grammatical, syntactic and audio elements of the language. The pre-existing recording was edited and the new one was incorporated in it in order to create a handy uniform database of the Tsakonian language.
Teacher Coordinator: Panagiotis Tsagouris