admin The 2012 grant application round for the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages project opens on 17th October 2011. The closing date for receipt of applications is 16th January 2012. ELDP provides grants for: PhD Scholarships (3 years, but no fees are covered), Postdoctoral Fellowships (2 years), Major documentation projects … Read more
Back in March I wrote about Kevin Scannell’s website called Indigenous Tweets that tracks use of minority and indigenous languages on Twitter. Scannell has now extended his coverage to blogs that post in what he calls “indigenous and minority languages”, that is, what some people might consider “small” languages. His site tracks blogs hosted at … Read more
(with corrections from Ed Garrett, 2011-09-22) In April this year I wrote a post called “Who uses digital language archives?”. This post is a short update on the current situation for the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at the School of Oriental and African Studies. ELAR was established in 2005 as part of the Hans Rausing … Read more
The following events may be of interest to readers: 1. Workshop on Language Ethics as a Field of Inquiry 11-12 November 2011, Montreal, Canada This workshop will bring together leading experts in politics, philosophy, linguistics, history and economics, in order to explore language ethics in a strong transdisciplinary environment. Papers that may be of particular … Read more
The third Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory conference will be held at SOAS in London on 19th to 20th November, preceded by a workshop on language documentation and archiving on 18th November. The conference programme and workshop programme are now available. On-line registration for the conference is now open here. Note that early bird registration … Read more
In a previous post I discussed ways in which it is possible to search for materials on endangered languages in various archives around the world (see also Nick Thieberger’s post on how much material doesn’t make it into archives). There is now another tool, namely the Virtual Language Observatory developed by the Max Planck Institute … Read more
Since 2005 I have been teaching a one Term introductory course each year on Historical Linguistics at SOAS and enjoying it a lot. The students especially like the coverage of semantic change, loanwords, and borrowing and language contact. One of the (standard) topics in this area that I cover is so-called folk etymology and typically … Read more
On 16th June, Nick Ostler, Mark Turin and I participated in a packed symposium at Gresham College in London (founded in 1597 and the capital’s oldest Higher Education Institution — read about its fascinating history here). The Symposium was entitled Rare and Endangered Languages, and the topics of our talks were as follows: Nick Ostler … Read more
Several podcasts about endangered languages are now available from the student-run online radio station SOAS Radio. They include: An interview with Gabriela Perez Baez, curator of Linguistics at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Gabriela talks in depth about her experience of researching endangered Zapotecan languages in Mexican and US immigrant communities. Her … Read more
In a previous post I looked at who might be using materials deposited in endangered languages digital archives. In this post I will look at searching for information in several of the larger archives. The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) has a simple search interface which allows users to find materials … Read more
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