Global Recordings Network

Global Recordings Network (GRN) Logo

Global Recordings Network (GRN) was founded by Joy Ridderhof in Los Angeles, California in 1939 as "Gospel Recordings, Inc." The mission of Global Recordings Network is "In partnership with the church, to effectively communicate the Good News of Jesus Christ by means of culturally appropriate audio and audiovisual materials in every language." This is accomplished by having native speakers of target languages record the stories of the Bible in their own native languages. These recordings are provided to the community by a mother-tongue speaker and providing them in an audio format to churches, mission organizations, and the community at large. Often the languages do not have a written form. Global Recordings Network has offices (centers) and bases in more than 50 countries. The motto of Global Recordings Network is "Telling the story of Jesus in EVERY language."

  • Global Recordings Network Founder Joy Ridderhof at Office
    Global Recordings Network Founder Joy Ridderhof at Office

The language professor Alexander Arguelles notes that it is possible to use these recordings and the accompanying text in a language the learner knows, to start learning any of the languages.[1] For many there is no other way to learn the language. 1,300 of the languages accompany the stories with standardized pictures, shown for 10–20 seconds, which allow learners to find short parallel sections in the language they know and the one they want to learn.[2]

When Joy Riidderhof was a missionary to Honduras in Central America in 1930s, she remembered gramophones playing hymns in English repeatedly without change. This gave her the idea of having the same thing done in Spanish.

Global Recordings Network is an evangelical faith mission organization to reach out to every language spoken in the world no matter how small the language group is. About two-thirds of the world are basically oral communicators in contrast to the one-thirds who are written communicators. Audio recordings and visual materials are essential means of communication.

Global Recordings Network has produced the gospel recordings in over 6,500 languages and dialects (speech varieties) https://5fish.mobi of the estimated over 13,000 languages and dialects (speech varieties) spoken in the world. About 5.2 billion people are oral learners.[3]

  • 5fish Logo
    5fish Logo

The recordings have been used for linguistic research on rhythm and phonological characteristics,[4] vowels,[5] consonants,[6] for comparative research on phonemes from hundreds of languages,[7] for developing and testing computer systems to recognize languages,[8] and for documenting and reviving rare languages.[9][10]

  1. ^ "Geographic Language Museum". Arguelles. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
  2. ^ ""Good News" audio-visual". Global recordings network. Retrieved 2018-02-03.
  3. ^ ""Statistics, International Orality Network" audio-visual". Global recordings network.
  4. ^ Easterday, Shelece; Timm, Jason; Maddieson, Ian (2011-08-17). "The Effects of Phonological Structure on the Acoustic Correlates of Rhythm" (PDF). International Phonetic Association. S2CID 30237767.
  5. ^ Pearce, Mary (2008). "Vowel harmony domains and vowel undershoot". CiteSeerX 10.1.1.591.3843.
  6. ^ Rivera-Castillo, Yolanda (2013). "A Monophonemic Analysis of Prenasalized Consonants in Saramaccan". Revista de Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola. Retrieved 2018-02-02.
  7. ^ Mąsior, Mariusz; Igras, Magdalena; Ziółko, Mariusz; Kacprzak, Stanisław (2013-05-09). "Database of speech recordings for comparative analysis of multi-language phonems". Studia Informatica (in Polish): 79–87. doi:10.21936/si2013_v34.n2B.52. Archived from the original on 2018-02-03. Retrieved 2018-02-03.
  8. ^ Castaldo F; Dalmasso E; Laface P; Colibro D; Vair C (2008-09-23). "Politecnico di Torino System for the 2007 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation" (PDF). Retrieved 2018-02-02.
  9. ^ Rybka, Konrad (2015-06-01). "State-of-the-Art in the Development of the Lokono Language" (PDF). University of Hawaii Press - Language Documentation & Conservation. Retrieved 2018-02-02.
  10. ^ Rybka (2016). "The linguistic encoding of landscape in Lokono". University of Amsterdam. Retrieved 2018-02-02.