Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) (original) (raw)
Language Endangerment
Today there are about 6,500 languages spoken worldwide and at least half of those will have fallen silent by the end of this century. In many areas of the world, globalisation creates economic, political and social pressures on people who in response give up their traditional ways of life, find new sources of income and move to cities. This causes speakers to cease speaking their traditional languages, and turn to other, typically more dominant languages to foster economic and social mobility for their children.
While throughout human history speakers have shifted to other languages, the speed of this development has increased dramatically over the past century. Each of these languages expresses the unique knowledge, history and worldview of their speaker communities, and each language is a specially evolved variation of the human capacity for language. Many of these disappearing languages have never been described or recorded and so the richness of human linguistic diversity is disappearing without a trace.
The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme responds to this loss by supporting researchers to document endangered languages worldwide.
Our key objectives are
• to support the documentation of as many endangered languages as possible
• to encourage fieldwork on endangered languages
• to create a repository of resources for linguistics, the social sciences, and the language communities themselves
• to make the documentary collections freely available
What we do
We support the documentation and preservation of endangered languages through granting, training and outreach activities. The collections compiled through our funding are freely accessible at the Endangered Languages Archive.
About us
The ELDP was founded in 2002 with a donation from the Arcadia fund to SOAS University of London. In 2021 ELDP moved to the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. ELDP has funded over 500 language documentation projects globally so far.
Our Grants
We provide grants world wide for the documentation of endangered languages. Individuals regardless of nationality or host institution can apply to our programme. We offer four different grant types and run one granting cycle per year opening 15th July each year.
Projects
Our focus is the linguistic documentation of endangered languages and making the digital collections freely available online. In addition we support capacity building through training in London and in country.
ELDP DOCUMENTATION PROJECTS
NEWS AND EVENTS
ELDP 2026 Grant Round is now open – 16 June 2025
The ELDP grant round for 2026 is now open. Information about grant types and application process can be found here. Visit our project pages for the types of projects we have funded and the Endangered Language Archive for the resulting digital collections.
ELDP Grantee Training
ELDP is running its annual grantee training on theory and method of modern language documentation and archiving from June 4 to June 11, 2025, in Berlin!
Call for nominations for the 2026 DELAMAN Award
Nominations for the 2026 DELAMAN Award are now being accepted. The deadline to submit a nomination is 02 November 2025. The winner will be announced in March 2026, and the prize will be awarded at the Language Documentation & Archiving conference in Berlin, Germany, in September 2026.
For full details about the award and the nomination process, see https://www.delaman.org/delaman-award/.
WeSearch event “When Tree Trunks Speak: Drummed Language in Colombia and Peru.”
Join us on 22 May 2025 at the Humboldt Forum for the next WeSearch event “When Tree Trunks Speak: Drummed Language in Colombia and Peru.” From 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM, explore how the Bora people of the Amazon use manguarés—hollowed-out tree trunks that produce deep, resonating tones—to send messages across vast distances in dense rainforest terrain.
Annual DELAMAN Members Meeting
ELAR is hosting the 2025 meeting of the DELAMAN archives — The Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network — at our offices in Berlin on April 9 and 10, 2025.
Interested in language archives?