LingQuest - the new language guessing game you should play!

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We've just published a research article on what languages players of the Great Language Game confused for each other. The game provided us with a lot of data, over 15 million guesses by an estimated 960,000 players. It was a lot of fun working with, and provided an interesting insight to what non-academics think about similarities of languages.

However, the game was not originally designed for research. Lars Yencken, the brilliant inventor of the game, intended it more as a fun game to spread awareness of linguistic diversity. The game presents some drawbacks, so in parallel with doing this research, we also designed a new game! Hurray!

LingQuest!

The game was designed by Seán Roberts, Peter Withers, myself and Mark Dingemanse and Pashiera Barkhuysen, and is a part of the Dutch research consortium Language in Interaction.

 The most significant change is that in this game you don't get to pair a language name with an audio clip, but instead compete by saying which two sound clips are of the same language. This makes for data that is less confounded with cultural knowledge that has less to do with how the languages sound.

 Go play it please!

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