Theme ELKL- 7

Much of the typological and linguistic studies have now started focusing on language documentation and description of endangered/lesser known languages across the world. This has also been at rise due to the constant development of technology and sustainable programs for language revitalization. While the previous ELKL conferences have focused on data collection, elicitation and data description apart from technological resources, the 7th ELKL conference is going to focus upon the data management and archival systems.

It is important to know how to store language data, especially, in the case of endangered languages as they are eventually at the verge of extinction. There are many projects related to endangered languages are going on across the world albeit there is much work left on how to manage such large scale of data that is continuously feeding the current linguistic research. Let us summarize some of the projects as the following

• http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/ on 3411 languages
• http://www.eldp.net/
• https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/research/research-clusters/documentation-and-description-of-endangered-languages.html
• https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/enduring-voices/
• http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/
• http://elalliance.org/
• http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/
• http://ling.hawaii.edu/research-current/projects/elcat/
• http://www.fpcc.ca/language/ELP/
• http://www.sppel.org/
• https://livingtongues.org/
• www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/3124670_centres-fro-preservation

In comparison to that there are few projects that have emphasized on digital archiving

• https://tla.mpi.nl/

The Language Archive will be part of the CLARIAH-PLUS consortium, which was awarded a grant of 13.8 million Euro from the Dutch research funder NWO. This grant will allow us to further enrich the tools and collections of the archive. See the news item on the MPI website for further details:

• http://www.language-archives.org/

OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources.

• https://www.soas.ac.uk/elar/

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) is a digital repository preserving and publishing multimedia collections of endangered languages. The archive contains collections from all over the world with regional strongholds in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and Latin America. To date, recordings encompassing over 450 languages can be found in ELAR. Collections in ELAR contain audio and video recordings of every day language use, verbal art, songs, narratives, ritual and more. The collections also contain dictionaries, pedagogical materials like primers for language teaching, transcriptions and translations of the recordings into the major contact language like Spanish, Mandarin, English or Russian for example.

ELAR’s mission is to:

1. provide a safe long-term repository for language documentation collections.
2. train and support depositors in collection creation and preservation.
3. make collections available free of charge to researchers, communities and the public.
4. support users in discovering and accessing recordings.

• https://www.uaf.edu/anla/

This material is based upon work supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities under grant PA-50139-03 and the National Science Foundation under grants 0957136, 1003481, 1003160. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

• http://www.paradisec.org.au/

This program is based on digitising and archiving the records of the many small languages of the world. They have worked to ensure that the archive can provide access to interested communities and conforms to international standards for digital archiving. While their original focus was the Asia-Pacific region, they now hold material from all over the world, and currently have over 1,000 languages represented in the collection.

• http://www.rnld.org/archives

The site lists down all the initiatives taken on the language revitalization and documentation both at the university level and at individual levels.

In this conference, we are planning to survey all the documentation projects and organize workshops that will help the students and researchers to get a hands on training for any documentation/ revitalization project.

Collaborators http://www.mdpi.com/

Languages (www.mdpi.com/journal/languages) is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal on interdisciplinary studies of languages and linguistics, indexed in ERIH Plus. We welcome contributions within any theoretical, experimental or applied approach.