Stimmen: A citizen science approach to minority language sociolinguistics

This paper presents the project Stimmen fan Fryslan 'Voices of Fryslan'. The project relies on a smartphone application developed to involve local communities in the creation of speech corpora, particularly of lesser used languages. This paper lays out the scientific and societal context of the project, showcases the smartphone application and gives an overview of the results from the project that attracted more than 15,000 users. Some key methodological issues are considered, and the paper discusses the role of smartphone technology for citizen science in minority language areas while also showing new maps with distributions of lexical and phonological variation in Frisian.