mScrabble: A Multilingual Scrabble and Lexicon Collection Generator

Abstract

In the situation of language endangerment, especially because of various kinds of pressure from surrounding majority languages and a low language prestige among the community members, language games of various kinds could prove to be an effective tool enhancing the prestige, providing an additional domain of language use to the community members and also for the researchers working with the communities for language documentation and possibly revitalisation. Keeping these in mind, we have developed a word game - mScrabble, a substantially changed and adapted version of the popular game of Scrabble for a large number of languages as a mobile app. In this paper, we present this game for two endangered Indian languages - Koda and Mahali - and discuss its features and rules, its technical specifications and its initial reception in the community. We also present a generic generator of this game which, given a word list and a few translations (of the items on the interface), could generate the game for any lan- guage. In addition to its primary function as a game, it could also be utilised for collecting lexical items from the community.