El día de muertos es una de las festividades más icónicas de México. Se celebra cada año entre el 31 de octubre y el 2 de noviembre, en los festivos católicos todos santos y fieles difuntos. En 2003 la UNESCO declaró las celebraciones del día de muertos de las comunidades indígenas de México Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial de la Humanidad. En 2008 las inscribió en la Lista Representativa del Patrimonio Cultural
Today on the ELAR blog, we celebrate UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage by highlighting a few ELAR collections that not only create new audiovisual documents but also incorporate heritage materials in meaningful ways. By Sydney Rey This year’s theme for UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is “Window to the world.” “Audiovisual materials as documentary heritage objects provide a window to the world as we observe events we cannot
In August 2019 Jerson Sebastian published ‘Njanga Neenga’ – a Coastal Dialect Dictionary of the variety of Malayalam spoken by fishermen in Kollam, India, which we will present to you in this week’s blog post. About the language The language documented in Jerson Sebastian’s dictionary is spoken by fishermen in Kollam, which is located in India’s Kerala state. The costal stretch where Jerson Sebastian’s data come from is 12 kilometres
To celebrate UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019, the SOAS World Languages Institute recorded a series of podcasts discussing topics around Indigenous, endangered and minoritised languages. Are you indigenous? In the first podcast episode titled Are you indigenous? Former ELAR Archive Assistants Francesca Brown and Clare Green explore questions like ‘Are you indigenous?’, ‘What makes a person indigenous?’, and ‘What does being indigenous really mean?’. SOAS graduate Adékúnmi Ọlátúnjí joined
This week on the ELAR Blog we want to celebrate World Poetry Day by sharing recordings of some of the beautiful poems from our collections with you. The selected poems were published in ‘Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages‘ last year. The volume was edited by National Poetry Librarian Chris McCabe, and introduced by Mandana Seyfeddinipur and Martin Orwin. UNESCO’s World Poetry Day on 21
By Adékúnmi Ọlátúnjí As part of our Virtual Language Fest in celebration of International Mother Language Day on 21 February, Adékúnmi Ọlátúnjí tells us about her experiences recording a podcast episode enquiring after people’s mother tongues. Her podcast episode forms part of a series of podcasts produced by SOAS World Languages Institute to celebrate UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019. Producing this podcast episode was a lot of fun
In memory of Tsendee Yunger, an ELDP grantee and ELAR depositor, who passed away in October 2019. We would like to showcase her work today on the ELAR blog, highlighting the beautiful and invaluable work she left with us. Tsendee Yunger and her language documentation left a left a major mark on both ELDP and ELAR. Dr Mandana Seyfeddinipur states: Tsendee was a Mongolian scholar who, with the help of her
Today is World Digital Preservation Day (#WDPD2019), and here at the Endangered Languages Archive we are celebrating by showcasing our deposits that were funded by the Legacy Material Grant from ELDP. It is estimated that there are 6,500 languages spoken in the world today, and that 50% of them will be gone by the end of the century. Due to globalization, the speed in which languages are shifting and disappearing
The Day of the Dead is one of Mexico’s most iconic festivities. It is celebrated every year from the 31st of October to the 2nd of November, corresponding to the catholic holidays of All Saints (Todos Santos) and All Souls (Fieles Difuntos). The Day of the Dead celebrations as practiced by the indigenous communities of Mexico were inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of
As a part of the International Week of the Deaf, 23rd September is celebrated worldwide as the International Day of Sign Languages. For this special day, we look at four of our collections from the ELAR archive about signed languages of the world! Kata Kolok Kata Kolok is a sign language used by about 1200 signers in rural Indonesia. It has been in use for over 5 generations of signers and