Where this is going
Most of the map is still black.
Indonesia alone has more than seven hundred living languages, and almost none of them have a dictionary a learner can actually open. SAWAH begins with Sasak, on Lombok, in five dialects.
It does not end there. The map is built to be coloured in, and what follows is the order we intend to colour it.
- Shipped, live today
- In build
- Planned
01 / Shipped8 features
A dictionary that exists
Everything here is live on this site right now. You can use all of it today.
Three level dialect map
Indonesia at a glance, Lombok up close, then a single dialect area filling the frame. Clicking any region filters the dictionary to it, and the view is shareable as a link.
Five dialect regions
Kuto-Kute, Ngeto-Ngete, Ngeno-Ngene, Meno-Mene and Meriaq-Meriku, drawn from real coastline data. Each owns a colour that follows its words everywhere they appear.
Trilingual entries
A Sasak headword, an English translation, an optional Indonesian bridge for local speakers, plus example sentences and usage notes.
Passwordless accounts
Sign in with a one time email link. Work is credited to an anonymous handle, and your address never appears anywhere in the dictionary.
Immediate publishing
A word you add is public the second you submit it. Nothing sits in a drawer waiting for permission before anyone can learn from it.
The editor seal
Entries whose translation an editor has verified as accurate carry a red tick. Unchecked ones are shown plainly without one, so you always know which is which.
Search across three languages
One query reaches Sasak, English and Indonesian at once, with fuzzy matching because Sasak has no standard spelling and the same word is typed four ways.
Abuse controls
Submission rate limits, duplicate detection that is blind to case and spacing, and bot traps on the form. All enforced by the database, not just the page.
02 / In build6 features
Proof from the people who speak it
A living language is settled by the people who use it. These give speakers the final word.
Search field
The search engine is already running underneath the site. This gives it a front door, with suggestions as you type and results that reorder live.
Community verification
Vote a word up or down. Five net votes earn it the seal without an editor ever touching it, so the dictionary can outgrow whoever started it.
Reporting
Flag a wrong translation or a mistaken dialect tag, with a reason. A reported word stops being eligible for automatic verification until it is settled.
Editing your own entries
Sharpen a translation or fix a typo after the fact, without deleting the word and starting again.
Saved words
Keep the words you want to come back to. A learner needs somewhere to put the ones that have not stuck yet, and a speaker needs somewhere to gather the ones worth arguing about.
Alphabetical browsing
An A to Z index for reading the dictionary straight through, rather than only finding words you already know to look for.
03 / Planned5 features
Sound, and being read
A dictionary of a spoken language you can only read is doing half the job.
Recorded pronunciation
Hear a word spoken by someone from that dialect. With no standard spelling, the recording is closer to a reference than the spelling is.
English to Sasak
Browse from the other direction, so an English speaker can look up the idea and find the Sasak, not only the reverse.
Open data export
The entire dictionary downloadable in one file under an open licence. Nobody should have to ask us for a language back.
Works without signal
Installable on a phone and readable offline, because a lot of Lombok is not a place with reliable data.
Contributor pages
A page per handle showing what someone has added, for those who want the credit visible.
04 / Where it goes4 features
Lombok, then everywhere
Nothing in how this is built is specific to Sasak. Every new language is a region that stops being black.
A second language
The proof that the shape holds. The database has handled multiple dictionaries since the first day it existed, and the map takes its regions as data.
Language switcher
Move between dictionaries from the header, each with its own regions, its own colours and its own contributors.
The Indonesian archipelago
Over seven hundred living languages, most with nothing a learner can open. The map already draws every island, waiting.
Asia, then the world map
The same gap repeats at a far larger scale. The rule does not change with the scale: written by the people who speak it.
05 / And much more
The rest has not been written down yet
Everything above is a list, and a list is a small thing next to a language. The words that matter most are usually the ones nobody thought to record: what you call the rain that arrives before a harvest, the word for a debt that is never spoken about, the joke that only works in one village.
Those do not arrive on a roadmap. They arrive when the people who speak them do.
Every black island is a language nobody has written down here yet.
Adding a language means colouring in another part of this map. Sasak is first because it had to start somewhere. Indonesia follows, then Asia, then wherever the map keeps going.