Elar Archive

“Of the more than 200 languages spoken in Brazil, 178 of them are indigenous and classified as vulnerable or endangered. According to UNESCO, 12 are extinct.”

As part of our Language Fest event on 21 February, we'll be documenting and sharing the 100+ languages spoken within SOAS. Come along to record your languages and add yourself to the SOAS We Talk language map 🌍
Learn more about the upcoming Language Fest at SOAS University of London here > https://buff.ly/2Sn96uA

🗣 Join us on Thursday 21 February, 12-5pm, as we celebrate International Mother Language Day at SOAS University of London.
SOAS staff, students and visitors will also be celebrating UNESCO's International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019 by showcasing their wide variety of work on languages.
Visit the SOAS World Languages Institute webpage below to find out more about what's going on throughout the day!

We are pleased to announce that Simon Devylder's project 'Black Sand Stories: a polysemiotic and multimodal documentation of Paamese sand stories, a critically endangered cultural tradition of Vanuatu' will officially kick off on 1 March 2019.
Find out more about the project on the ELAR catalogue > https://elar.soas.ac.uk/Collection/MPI120 7737

SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies is hosting talks this week on Indigenous communities in Taiwan. All the events are free and open to the public. Visit their Facebook page or website for more information > https://www.soas.ac.uk/taiwanstudies/even ts/

Charles Darwin University and The Australian National University will start teaching Kunwinjku, an endangered Indigenous language spoken by the Bininj people of West Arnhem Land in northern Australia 👏
Find out more at National Indigenous Times via the link below!

This week ELAR joined the global launch of the United Nations's International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019. ELAR and ELDP were both represented at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris by Mandana Seyfeddinipur.
Visit our ELAR blog to find out more about the event and IYIL2019. ⬇️

The Centre for Endangered Languages, Cultures and Ecosystems (CELCE) will launch at University of Leeds on 30 January, 4.30pm.
The Centre takes multidisciplinary views of the relationship between local languages, cultures and ecosystems. It also works closely with local community members across the globe to examine how local communities can be supported in maintaining and promoting their indigenous languages, cultures and ecosystems.
Find out more about CELCE and the launch below.

Mandana Seyfeddinipur is representing ELAR and ELDP at today's global launch event of the UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019.
Tune into the webcast and join the launch from 3pm CET. English: https://buff.ly/2FYZvCV French: https://buff.ly/2G0Wl1K

We're pleased to announce that Mandana Seyfeddinipur will be representing ELAR and ELDP as a plenary speaker at the International Conference on Minority Languages this May.
Find more information about the conference here:

Last Whispers, a multimedia installation on the loss of the world's linguistic and cultural diversity, begins its 2019 tour.
Last Whispers was made in close collaboration with ELAR and SOAS World Languages Institute. Find more information and international tour dates on our blog!

To mark 2019 as UNESCO's Year of Indigenous Languages, SOAS University of London's Prof Friederike Lüpke has launched a blog on aspects of African languages.

Linguist Lisa Lim from University of Sydney talks about why ‘indigenous’ deserves to be word of the year (via South China Morning Post)

The state of Australia's Indigenous languages – and how we can help people speak them more often (via The Conversation).
Did you know that ELAR has around 35 deposits focused on Australian languages? Explore them here > https://buff.ly/2Cypmyg

The United Nations The Lid Is On podcast speaks with indigenous community members and the Endangered Language Alliance to explore how language loss is a symptom of how indigenous identities are increasingly at risk.

As part of the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL2019), indigenous language digital activists will take control of the @ActLenguas (Language Activism) Twitter account to tell stories of their experiences with language revitalization.

Visit our blog to learn about ELDP grantee Palash Kumar Nath’s project, ‘Documentation of the oral literature of the Tai Khamyang community in Upper Assam, India’.
The Tai-Khamyang language is a highly endangered language spoken in the Upper Assam area of Northeast India.

On our ELAR blog, we feature a highlight from ELDP grantee and ELAR depositor Wayan Arka.
The Merauke Languages Project focuses on ethnobiological documentation of two endangered Papuan languages of the Wasur National Park, Merauke-Indonesia: Marori and Smärky Kanum.