NirvanLabs

Language is the one invention that the whole of humanity has worked on. No one designed it and no one is in charge of it. Every language spoken today is the combined work of the people who have spoken it, over thousands of years, and none of them planned the result.

A language has no finished state. There is no complete edition of Dutch, English or Hindi held somewhere and handed out to new speakers. There is the language as it is used today by the people using it, and there is the record of how it was used before.

Language has never stopped changing, and it changes through use. A word is used in a slightly new way in one household, one workplace, one town. If the new use serves the people there, it is repeated, and after a while it is what the word means in that place.

This happens first in ordinary speech, in particular places, among particular people. Dictionaries and grammars record the change afterwards, if they record it at all. Two towns a short drive apart can use the same word in different ways for a generation, and neither of them is using it wrongly.

The community that uses a language is the one that keeps it alive. A word means what that community has settled on. That settlement belongs to a place and a time. In the next region, or twenty years later, it may be different.

A standard variety is useful. It lets people who will never meet write to one another. It is still one variety among many, and much of everyday speech happens outside it.

People now write with help. A phone suggests the next word and corrects the last one. A message is translated before it is read. A reply is drafted for the person sending it. Most of the products that do this work from one standard variety of each language. A word used every day in one region is marked as a mistake. A translation reads as if it were written in the capital. A reply is worded in a way no one in the reader’s town would word it.

A product used by a community should work from the language that community uses, in the place where it uses it. That requires measuring how the language is used in each region, from what people there write.

In conversation, a listener knows who is speaking. They hear how a sentence is meant, know something of what the speaker has said before, and can ask when they are unsure. A post on a public platform arrives without any of this. It is read by strangers who cannot hear its tone and do not know its author, sometimes years after the author’s view has changed.

The lab has two products. Terrior concerns how a language is used in a particular region. Kithe concerns how what one person writes is understood by others.

Address

Binnendongenstraat 4L
5707 TA Helmond
the Netherlands

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Correspondence

hello@nirvanlabs.eu

Products

terrior.app, kithe.social