(AINA) -- The Association Assyrophile de France has announced the completion of the first phase of the online Assyrian dictionary project. The dictionary is available to students, Assyrians and all others interested in the Modern Assyrian language. The project digitized Oraham's Assyrian-English dictionary, and also added French translations for all the words.

The dictionary is available online at Assyrian dictionary.

Having finished Oraham's dictionary, the project is now adding Maclean's Dictionary, Yoab Benjamin's dictionary and others. The dictionary is also being translated into Portuguese and German.

The next major task is to add audio to the dictionary, with each word being recorded for listening. The project is calling for Assyrian native speakers to volunteer for audio recording the words in the dictionary, and for working on other tasks in the project.

The project had its origins at a conference for foreign languages spoken in France. Mr. Jean-Paul Sliva, of Association Assyrophile, met Olivier Lauffenburger, a talented computer programmer whose many hobbies included the Akkadian and Hittite languages. Mr. Lauffenburger had developed a Hittite website and had thus acquired the skills of dealing with cuneiform characters on screen displays. Association Assyrophile, having quite a few documents about Akkadian (ancient Assyrian), suggested they join their effort. Mr. Lauffenburger agreed and wrote a program to create an Akkadian-English-French dictionary (Akkadian dictionary). Based on this work, Association Assyrophile and Mr. Lauffenburger were quickly able to begin the Assyrian dictionary project in 2006.

If you are interested in volunteering for this project, contact Mr. Jean-Paul Sliva of Association Assyrophile de France at J-Paul.Sliva@ac-toulouse.fr.