About

The Transient Cultures and Languages blog began back in 2006 at the University of Sydney. In 2010 it became apparent that if we wanted to grow as a blog, we would have to leave the confines of the University of Sydney’s blogging system and host our own software. The main reason for this was to give contributor accounts to people who were neither staff members or students at the university.

In early 2011, we moved the blog to a WordPress installation hosted on servers owned by PARADISEC, maintained by the University of Melbourne. In doing so, we migrated all older posts from the University of Sydney based blog to the new installation so that all older posts and comments can be viewed on this website.

We also decided it was time to change the name from Transient Languages and Cultures to Endangered Languages and Cultures, as the former name was linked to the fact that both PARADISEC and the Sydney University linguistics department reside in the Transient Building, and the move to servers housed in Melbourne meant that this link was no longer as salient.

During the move, we encountered several problems to do with Movable Type software that may result in broken links, missing images and other issues. We tried to minimise as much of this as possible, but with over 500 posts, we are bound to have missed plenty.

This blog covers many different projects and groups all with the common theme of endangered languages and culture. This includes a heavy emphasis on linguistic documentation, fieldwork, technology, language maintenance and education, and issues that pertain to endangered languages and cultures around the world. We welcome you to explore the categories in the sidebar, and we welcome your input on any matters, although you should read our comments policy before doing so.