NirvanLabs
NirvanLabs is a lab that studies how people use a language in a particular place, and how that use changes over time. The products we build, i.e., Terrior and Kithe, are based on this research.
Language and its speakers
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, and a language spoken today is the result of how its speakers have used it over thousands of years, without any of them having planned the form it has now.
For this reason, a language has no finished version. There is no complete edition of Dutch, English or Hindi that is kept somewhere and given to new speakers, only the language as it is used today and the record of how it was used before.
How a language changes
A language changes through use. A word is used in a slightly different way in one household or workplace, and if the new use is useful to the people there, it is repeated until it becomes what the word means in that place.
This happens first in everyday speech, among particular people in a particular place, and dictionaries and grammars record the change later, if they record it at all. As a result, two towns a short distance apart can use the same word differently for a generation, with each use being correct in the town where it occurs.
Communities and the standard variety
A word means what the community using it has settled on, and this is specific to a place and a time, i.e., it may be different in the next region or twenty years later. In this sense, it is the community using a language that keeps it in use.
A standard variety is useful, as it allows people who will never meet to write to one another. However, it is one variety among many, and a large part of everyday speech takes place outside it.
Writing with products
People now write with the help of products. A phone suggests the next word and corrects the previous one, and a message is often translated before it is read. Most of these products work from one standard variety of each language, so a word used every day in one region is marked as a mistake, and a translation reads as if it had been written in the capital.
We believe that a product used by a community should work from the variety that community uses, in the place where it uses it. This requires measuring how the language is used in each region, from what people there write.
Reading a post
In a conversation, the listener knows who is speaking and can ask when something is unclear. A post on a public platform is read without this, often by people who do not know its author, and in some cases years after the author’s view has changed.
Our work
We are building two products. Terrior is concerned with how a language is used in a particular region, and Kithe with how what one person writes is understood by others.
Terrior
Terrior is being built to rewrite a text toward the way one region writes its language, rather than toward the language as a whole.
It is based on our research into how a language varies from one region to another, i.e., which of several words for the same thing a region uses, and how often it uses words borrowed from another language. So far, we have studied German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and Hindi in Delhi and Lucknow. The results show that, in both languages, regions that share a language differ measurably in the words they use.
Kithe
Kithe is a social platform. We are building it around four problems with current platforms. First, people are misunderstood. Second, the context of what they said is lost. Third, an old post continues to be read as the author’s current view, long after that view has changed. Fourth, access and reach are uneven, and some accounts are privileged over others.
The lab
- Address
- Binnendongenstraat 4L
5707 TA Helmond
the Netherlands - Chamber of Commerce
- KvK 85770833
- Correspondence
- hello@nirvanlabs.eu
- Products
- terrior.app, kithe.social