SMiLE: Serious Gaming for Minority Language Elicitation

SMiLE deals with Serious Gaming as a tool for language learning for regional and minority languages, with Frisian as a case study. SMiLE has as main target group secondary education students. Firstly, we want to develop a Game Design concept that focuses on improving motivation and attitude towards Frisian. Secondly, we want to analyze which elements are to be incorporated to improve language competence by defining supportive elements for language learning in a gaming concept. The main focus will be on analysing how the vocabulary of students can be improved and how to facilitate this by incorporating language technologies in the SMiLE game. Other issues are: Can Dutch and English be used as supportive elements in a game, since they are also a West Germanic language and typologically related? How can a game be developed to incorporate other minority languages in a multi-player and multi-lingual setting? How can we create a gaming experience that translates into presence of regional language utterance in the public space? These are also relevant questions for the private partners since the game’s market potential increases when multiple minority languages can be trained using the same game. Further, addressing such questions helps to formulate a game which can support to strengthen minority languages’ vitality. SMiLE makes use of findings of previous projects a.o.: Taalweb, a cooperation between Gridline and the Fryske Akademy (tool which enables to identify dialect and language varieties) and the EU LLP project GOBL on language learning coordinated by Nijmegen University (http://www.gobl project.eu/).

Partners:

• Edwin Klinkenberg, Hindrik Sijens, Fryske Akademy
• Helmer Strik, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
• Hylke van Dijk, NHL
• Tigran Spaan, Gridline
• Jan Jaap Severs, Grendel Games

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