On May 27, 2019 a Symposium on Indigenous Languages was organized at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, the oldest and largest university in Bulgaria. The event was part of the calendar of 2019 – the International Year of Indigenous Languages, declared by UNESCO. The symposium was also part of a series of events dedicated to May 24 – the Day of the Cyrillic Script and Bulgarian Language, which is a public
On the ELAR blog this week, we are introducing the DoReCo project (Language Documentation Reference Corpus). DoReCo started in March 2019 and is a French-German collaborative project that brings together spoken language corpora from about 50 languages, extracted from documentations of small and often endangered languages. Matt Stave, postdoctoral researcher at Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage in Lyon, tells us more about the project and its aims. Please can you tell us a
On the ELAR blog this week, we’re featuring videos from Eli Timan’s deposit “Jewish Iraqi spoken language documentation” [0026] [0102]. Eli’s collection contains personal stories, songs and descriptions of life in Iraq in the first half of the 20th century as told by Jewish Iraqi speakers in London, Canada and Israel. A wide variety of topics are covered, including life in Baghdad, schools, marriage, and historical events affecting the life
Today on the ELAR blog, we are featuring ELDP grantee John Elliott’s ‘The Enxet Documentation Project’. John’s collection with ELAR focuses on the Enxet Sur language (ISO639-3:enx), spoken by approximately 4,000 speakers in the Enlhet-Enenlhet nation in Paraguay. John Elliot, from the University of Hawaii, gives us his community and scientific highlights from his research between 2015 and 2017. Impact on the community and speakers: “One of the most successful aspects of the project was the degree
For International Women’s Day 2019, we asked our depositors to share stories of amazing women who they have worked with in communities around the world. Unsurprisingly, we got so many contributions and we weren’t able to share them all at the time. Today on the ELAR blog, we are sharing even more contributions on our blog to highlight the variety of stories we received. Inés Nemonte Nenquimo (contributed by Connie
On the ELAR blog this week, ELDP grantees and ELAR depositors Andrew Harvey and Richard Griscom give an introduction to the Rift Valley Research Network, a group of researchers interested in the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Rift Valley. The Research Network was established to make it easier to share research, to help form new collaborations, and to provide a space to learn from each other. Please could you give
Following on from Part 1 of our Spring recap, here’s the second part of our roundup, featuring language documentation training in India and some of our upcoming events during 2019. From 14-23 April, Mandana traveled to Ranchi, India, to deliver language documentation training with Felix Rau (University of Cologne) and ELDP grantee Alex Garcia (Universitat de Barcelona). The “International Workshop on the Documentation of Endangered Languages and Cultures” was organised by
We are pleased to announce that the International conference on Language Diversity and Preservation of Cultural Heritage (LCP 2019) will take place from 17-18 December 2019 at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia (RILCA), Mahidol University, Thailand. LCP 2019 will be hosted by RILCA at Mahidol University and is organised in collaboration with ELAR at SOAS, University of London. RILCA has conducted research over the past 40 years
2019 has already proven to be a very busy year here at ELAR and ELDP! To keep you up to date with what we’ve been up to, here is Part 1 of our Spring round-up. To kick off 2019, Mandana Seyfeddinipur visited UNESCO, Paris, in January to attend the celebration of the UN’s International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL2019). The global launch event gathered a variety of attendees, including indigenous
Two Ghanaian scholars have been supported by American Friends of SOAS (AFSOAS) to attend ELDP language documentation training at SOAS later this year. Kenneth Bodua-Mango and Ida Sodoke Assem are graduate students who intend to pursue PhDs focusing on the documentation of Animere, a highly endangered Ghana-Togo Mountain language (Kwa; Niger-Congo). It is spoken in the towns of Kecheibi and Kunda in the Nkwanta South district of Ghana’s Oti region.