True Motu Dictionary
A living dictionary for Motu korikori, an endangered language of Papua New Guinea — 15,610 words with family-contributed translations and recordings.
- Role
- Creator
- Stack
- Next.jsSupabaseCloudflare R2Vercel
True Motu (Motu korikori) is the original language of the Motu people around Port Moresby — distinct from Hiri Motu, the simplified trade pidgin — and like many Pacific languages it’s losing ground with every generation.
The dictionary was seeded by a parallel-text pipeline I built: aligning the 1973 True Motu Bible with English verse-by-verse (~31,000 verse pairs) and extracting a 15,610-word vocabulary. On top of that corpus, family members — built with and for my extended family — contribute English translations, pronunciation recordings, and comments. A weighted consensus algorithm settles disagreements, counting native and heritage speakers more heavily. Audio uploads flow through a Cloudflare Worker into R2.
Open source under MIT, structured so any endangered-language community can fork it. Currently resting between contribution bursts.