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
Grant round closes - 01 October 2024
The ELDP grant round closes on October 1st at 5 pm CEST. Please make sure you submit your application before that. Support statements and References and Host verification are due by October 15th.
Documenting Language. How language enters the archive - 10 October 2024
Mandana Seyfeddinipur and Uta Kornmeier will discuss how languages are documented and preserved, addressing questions about recording techniques and ownership of recorded speech on 10 October 2024.
Learn more here.
Talk by Dr. Alejandro de Ávila - 9 October 2024
Alejandro de Ávila Blomberg from the Jardín Etnobotánico & Museo Textil de Oaxaca will give a talk on "Lexicon, technique and symbolism in Mesoamerican textiles". The event is co-organised by Endangered Language Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Ethnological Museum, Staatliche Museen Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.
Register here.
24 International Literature Festival Berlin - 5-18 September 2024
Mandana Seyfeddinipur will chair the discussion "Lost/Found in Translation: The Joys and Challenges of Multivocality" on 13 September 2024 at 8pm in Berlin with Mkuki Bgoya, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Chika Unigwe.
Learn more here.
21st International Congress of Linguists, Poznan, Poland- 10 September 2024
Kelsey Neely, Vera Ferreira & Mandana Seyfeddinipur are presenting a session on "Language Documentation training as an underpinning of grammar writing"
Mandana Seyfeddinipur will lead a panel on "20 years of language documentation: where do we need to go from here" joined by Katharina Haude, Felix Ameka and Andre Shluinski.
Learn more here.