January 2024 Newsletter

Linguistics Justice League (LJL) is excited to share our first update of the year! In January we hosted language and culture workshops for refugee kids in partnership with World Relief Western Washington. LJL launched the “Heritage Hub” project, which collects voice data in marginalized languages and has been selected by the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial program for mentorship.  LJL has been approved to offer the US Presidential Service Awards to our volunteers. The LJL team welcomes new volunteers, Angelique and Allison! LJL aims to impact 100,000 marginalized language speakers by the end of this year and is well on our way to achieve this goal! Also, check out an interesting article on second language acquisition by Yaejun Myung, our new dynamic and passionate social media coordinator!

Workshop with World Relief Washington

The Linguistics Justice League organized a workshop in collaboration with World Relief Washington. We organized a “Finding your trusted adult” awareness program for Washington state’s refugee children. 

LJL volunteers created a skit for the children and had the kids do some of our activities in both English and their native language. We plan to translate our skits into multiple low resource languages such as Dari and Pashto. 

NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center Selects HeritageHub

One of LJL's goals is to democratize AI and technology making it accessible to speakers of all languages across the world. To achieve this goal, we kicked off our exciting new project called "Heritage Hub". Heritage Hub is a digital platform where users can share cultural stories in their native languages and get compensated for their voice and text data. We plan to use this voice data to help train ML models and make them more accessible in low resource languages. Nasdaq Entrepreneurial program, with mentors who are renowned entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and executives selected LJL and our Heritage Hub project for their mentorship. They are helping us reach our goal of impacting 100,000 marginalized language speakers by the end of 2024!

US Presidential Service Awards

Linguistics Justice League partnered with Points of Light to offer the U.S. Presidential Service Awards to our exceptional volunteers. Recipients will be honored with a personalized certificate indicating their achievement level—Gold, Silver, Bronze, or Lifetime Achievement. Select awards will also include a letter from the President of the United States. Our volunteers will receive an exclusive pin, coin, or medallion to symbolize their dedication and achievement in volunteerism.

Welcome New Volunteers!

Angelique:

Meet Angelique, a language aficionado with a master’s degree in Applied linguistics, specializing in computational linguistics. When she’s not immersed in the fascinating world of words, she’s a freelance language analyst, bringing her passion for languages to life. Beyond the academic realm, she loves connecting with people from diverse cultures, adding a warm and personal touch to the vibrant tapestry of language exploration.

Allison:

Allison is an undergraduate pre-law student at Washington University studying Anthropology, Linguistics, and Legal Studies. Her interests lie in the exploration of language, culture, and environmental studies, particularly how these elements interact with politics and the legal field. She is passionate about contributing to LJL’s mission to make language learning accessible to underrepresented and low-income communities.