10 years, 1,800 survey sites: inside China’s hi-tech push to map linguistic diversity

Speak a few sentences of your hometown dialect into a microphone at a museum in central China, and a machine will pinpoint exactly where you are from.
The interactive voice-recognition booth is among star attractions at a new language resources hall that opened on Monday at the Hunan Museum in Changsha.
The hall showcases recordings and other language materials from Chinese dialects, minority languages and oral culture collected over the past decade. The compilation from more than 1,800 field...