Come and celebrate European Day of Languages with the SOAS World Language Institute on Tuesday, September 26th, between 4pm and 8pm at Senate House (SOAS). Following the success of the European Year of Languages in 2001, the Council of Europe declared a European Day of Languages to be celebrated on the 26th of September every year. This occasion aims to celebrate the linguistic diversity of Europe, to raise awareness of European minority
This week on the ELAR blog, ELDP grantee and ELAR depositor Mirjam Möller interviews community member Elisha Yunana. Mirjam and Elisha work together on a documentation project on Baa, an Adamawa language of Nigeria. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your language? My name is Elisha Yunana. I’m married, and have two children, and live with my family in Lagos. I was born and brought up in Gyakan in
Today on the ELAR blog, depositor Karolina Grzech talks about creating an educational film for the Tena Kichwa-speaking community. Napo Runa Sachamanda Ambiguna is an educational DVD made entirely in Tena Kichwa, an under-described Quechuan language spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It was developed as part of an ELDP-funded project to document and describe the language, and was made possible by additional funds from the Frederick Soddy Trust/Royal Geographical Society. The film
Today on the ELAR blog, Jean Rohleder who does fieldwork in New Caledonia talks about his research and his field trip he took late last year. Please tell us a bit about where you are doing your fieldwork. New Caledonia, the “Island of Eternal Spring”, is home to about 270,000 people, on 18,000 km² (roughly half of Switzerland). Rainy in the East, dry in the West, never colder than 18
Today on the ELAR blog, Joey Lovestrand discusses his use of video in his language documentation work on the Barayin language in Chad. When I first went to Chad in 2010 and began working with speakers of the Barayin language, the idea of video documentation seemed unreasonable. I didn’t have the funds for the equipment or space to store the data, and I wasn’t sure how people would react to
The Mercator Research Centre, SOAS World Languages Institute, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation and the Foundation for Endangered Languages cordially invite scholars, community organisations and community members working on the revitalization of endangered languages, its documentation and archiving to join the International Conference on “Communities in Control” that will take place in Alcanena, Portugal, on October 19-21 2017. This conference is organised together with the Foundation of
Today on the ELAR blog, depositor and ELDP grantee Azeb Amha gives readers some insight into the daily routine of her documentation project, documentation of house construction and terrace farming in Zargulla, an endangered Omotic language. 1. Please tell us a bit about where you are doing your fieldwork. My fieldwork is based in ɗimalle k’ebele[1] in the Bonke district of Gamo-Gofa Zone. ɗimalle is approximately 500 km south-west from
This week on the ELAR blog, ELDP grantee Alexandro Garcia Laguia interviews Nelita Cristobal, an Alta speaker who is working with him to document the Northern Alta language in the Phillipines. Thank you to Alexandro and Nelita for providing this interview! 1. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your language? My name is Nelita Cristobal, but most people here call me ‘Ate Tikkay’. I was born in in 1962
Today on the ELAR blog, Eri Kashima shares her tried and true segmenting shortcuts for depositors working with ELAN and Praat. Read on for a step-by-step walkthrough of her process: My number one hated stage in transcription work is segmenting. I would sit there fuming while manually segmenting the recordings I made before I could even start transcribing. It was frustrating because it seemed like something that a machine could to
Today on the ELAR blog, Peter and Bobby Black discuss their project documenting Tobian. Tobian (Ramari Hatohobei) is the language of Tobi, one of the Southwest Islands of the Republic of Palau, a Micronesian nation in the western Pacific. Severely endangered, Tobian is currently spoken by approximately 150 people. Tobian and the dialects of Sonsorol, Merir, and Pulo Anna, the other three Southwest Islands, are closely related to the languages