About the project

Bublang is an independent project from Poland about spoken language as something people inherit. Not a course, not a dictionary and not a preservation archive. A way of putting a voice back in the place it came from, so a language can be met before it is studied.

What it is trying to do

Languages are usually presented to outsiders as systems: grammar, a word list, a flag beside a lesson. What people actually inherit is narrower and more specific than that. An accent from one valley. The way an older relative opens a sentence. A register used only at home.

Bublang works from the other direction. It begins with one person speaking in one place, and lets the language follow from that. The interface being designed for this is a map, because place is the part people recognise first.

Why voice rather than text

Writing preserves what a language can say. Voice preserves who was saying it. Most of what separates one variety of a language from another lives in speech and is never written down at all, so when a language stops being used in a household that layer disappears first and leaves the least behind.

Where the work is focused

The first documentation focus is Andio, a language of the Banggai region in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. It is spoken by a small community and has close to no presence online. The intention is to do one language properly, together with people from that community, rather than to cover many languages thinly.

Two collaborators are currently being looked for: a language documentation specialist with fieldwork experience, and an Indonesian community organisation with genuine local ties.

Where the project is right now

Early development. Last updated September 2026.

Bublang is early and is built by one person. What exists today is the idea, the design work, a private prototype of the map interface, and a first set of short character films made as internal studies.

What does not exist yet: a public platform, a published archive, an app, recordings made with community speakers, an organisation, funding or a team. Nothing on this website should be read as implying otherwise.

If you arrived here from an email, this is the accurate picture of what you would be looking at.

Why any of this is worth doing, and who is doing it, is here.