Endangered Languages

More stories from ELAP graduates

by

Back in January I wrote a post about stories we were publishing on the SOAS Endangered Languages Project website about some of our alumni and the interesting lives they are leading after having graduated from the University of London. There are now nine stories available, with several more in the pipeline. If you want some … Read more

Email, RSS Follow

Another one bites the dust (with apologies to Queen)

by

The situation with projects focussed on the documentation and support of endangered and minority languages is starting to look, well, endangered, if not downright moribund. Apparently, Unesco shut down its project on endangered languages within the intangible cultural heritage area towards the end of last year. Volkswagen Foundation held its last DoBeS grants committee meeting … Read more

Email, RSS Follow

Retrofitting a collection? I’d rather not

by

I just had a visit from a student wanting to deposit a collection of recordings made in the course of PhD fieldwork in the PARADISEC archive. It is a great shame that they are only just now thinking about how to deposit this material, as it will need considerable work to make it archivable. If they had sought advice before doing all of the research (or looked at the PARADISEC page ‘Depositing with PARADISEC’, or looked at the RNLD pages, e.g, http://www.rnld.org/node/40) it would have been so much easier for all of us. Why?

Read more

Email, RSS Follow

7th European Australianist workshop

by

Candide Simard (ELAP) is organising the 7th European Australianists workshop 2012 which will be held at SOAS on 3-4 April. The purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue for the presentation and discussion on current research on Australian languages. As in previous workshops a theme is suggested: ‘Contact phenomena in Australian languages’. However, … Read more

Email, RSS Follow

3L Summer School in Lyon, France, July 2012

by

The fourth International Summer School of the 3L Consortium (Lyon, London, Leiden) will be hosted by the LED-TDR team (Langues En Danger-Terrain, Documentation, Revitalisation), members of the DDL and ICAR laboratories (University Lumière-Lyon 2 and ENS Lyon, France), from 1st to 13 July 2012. It follows on from the highly successful 3L Summer Schools in … Read more

Email, RSS Follow

ELAR turns 50

by

The latest, and fiftieth, deposit to go online at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) is Trevor Johnson’s magnificent Auslan Corpus. Auslan is Australian Sign Language and the corpus consists of over 900 bundles (including over 850 video recordings) of one hundred native or near-native deaf signers filmed in pairs between mid-2004 and mid-2007 in five … Read more

Email, RSS Follow

Sustainable data from digital research – presentations available

by

In December 2011 PARADISEC hosted a conference titled ‘Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship’. Presentations from that conference are now available as audio or video downloads from the following repository: http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/7890. Ten of these presentations also include a peer-reviewed chapter in the conference proceedings.

See below for an RSS feed of all titles and links in the The University of Sydney eScholarship Repository

Read more

Email, RSS Follow

Get stuffed endangered languages!

by

I thought a low point of journalistic reporting about endangered languages was reached yesterday when the Australian press ran a story entitled “Cyber zoo to preserve endangered languages” that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Brisbane Times (and apparently also the Brisbane Sunday Mail, hat tip Felicity Meakins), the Melbourne Age, the Canberra Times … Read more

Email, RSS Follow

Endangered languages, technology and social media (again)

by

There has been a little flurry of media stories about endangered languages in the last couple of days with titles like “Digital tools ‘to save languages’” on the BBC News website and “Cyber zoo to preserve endangered languages” in the Sydney Morning Herald (readers who are on Facebook can find a full listing on David … Read more

Email, RSS Follow