Today on the ELAR Blog, Swintha Danielsen shares on a community event she hosted at a local school during her fieldwork in Bolivia. To learn more about Swintha’s work, visit her deposit on the ELAR catalogue. In Urubichá, Guarayos, Bolivia, Swintha Danielsen hosted a contest at the local school for the best story writers in the Guarayu language. On July 16th the stories were handed in, and on July 21st,
Last month, ELDP held a one-week long fall school on theory and methods in modern language documentation focusing on the Middle East and North Africa region from October 10th-17th. The school was held in collaboration with and hosted by the Zentrum fuer Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin, Germany. Today on the ELAR blog, we are sharing some of the participants’ feedback on the training: The Fall School of Documentary Linguistics equipped
From 2013 to 2017 three ELDP grantees; Katia Chirkova, Han Zhengkang, and Wang Dehe worked on the documentation and description of a critically endangered Tibeto-Burman language, Duoxu, as part of the “Comparative and Cross-Varietal Documentation of Highly Endangered Languages of South-West China” (MDP0257) project, funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. The research team’s documentation work consisted of recording the speech of the last fluent Duoxu speakers, supplemented by vocabulary
Today on the ELAR blog, we are featuring the Äiwoo dictionary created by ELDP grantee Åshild Næss. Äiwoo is also known as Reefs or Ayiwo. It belongs to the Reefs-Santa Cruz language group, which in turn is classified as belonging to the Temotu first-order subgroup of Oceanic. The language has a total of 7-8,000 speakers, of which 5-6,000 live in the Reef Islands, the rest on Santa Cruz or in
The SOAS World Languages Institute (UK), Mercator Research Centre, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation and the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) cordially invite scholars, community organisations and community members to join the International Conference on “BIG Cities, Small LANGUAGES” that will take place on November 14-16 2018, at the ZAS in Berlin, Germany. By now it is generally known that linguistic diversity of humanity is on the rapid
Katia Chirkova and Wang Dehe, two ELDP grantees, have conducted – in collaboration with James N. Stanford of Dartmouth College – a sociolinguistic survey of the Ersu language, aimed at investigating consonantal variation in this language. The survey was part of the “Comparative and Cross-Varietal Documentation of Highly Endangered Languages of South-West China” (MDP 0257) project, which was funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) and lasted from 2013
Today on the ELAR blog, we are featuring the newly-released eBook ‘Selim and the Dom-Fruit’. The ebook is in Mehri, as spoken by Bayt Qhoor, a sub-tribe of Bayt Thuwar in Central Oman. The book was made in Salalah. It was first written by Abdullah al-Mahri and Janet Watson in October 2017, and completed with photographs in 2018. Abdullah produced the voice over. Janet, an ELDP grantee, is here on
This week at ELAR, we celebrated International Mother Language day on February 21st! On the same day, SOAS World Languages Institute launched it’s long awaited language-exchange app for Android, Speak SOAS. SOAS is home to over 100 languages, so this app is perfect for SOASians looking to learn both large and small languages. This app allows SOASians to find language exchange buddies within the university. Users may choose up to
Katia Chirkova and Han Zhengkang, two ELDP grantees, have written the first-ever textbook of Duoxu, accompanied by sound files on a CD. The textbook was funded by ELDP (MDP 0257) and the Sichuan Research Institute for the Nationalities (四川省民族研究所). Duoxu (/do³³-ɕu³³-na³¹/, Duōxù 多续 or Duōxū 多须 in Mandarin Chinese) is a little-known and virtually undescribed Tibeto-Burman language, spoken in Mianning county (冕宁县), which is located in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous
Today on the ELAR blog, ELDP grantee Saloumeh Gholami tells us about sharing this video created by Chouette Films from documentation of Dari speakers from Saloumeh’s project. Please tell us a bit about the event. What sparked it? I had sent the video to one of my colleagues who was collaborating with me on the Dari project. Two hours later, I saw that the video had appeared on various Telegram