The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) offers research grants to support documentation of the world’s endangered languages in collaboration with language communities.

The Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP) is situated within the University of London SOAS’ Department of Linguistics. ELAP conducts postgraduate teaching and research on the theory and practice of language documentation and description. Our goal is to develop the skills of those currently engaged in endangered language documentation and to train the next generation of language documenters.

ELAP offers courses and fellowships including:

• A one year MA in Language Documentation and Description, open to those with or without previous linguistics study. There are two pathways: a Field Linguistics pathway, and a Language Revitalisation and Support pathway,
• A PhD in Field Linguistics, that includes fieldwork overseas;
• Two year post-doctoral fellowships at SOAS with opportunities to carry out independent research, fieldwork and contribute to teaching.

Currently there are 16 MA and 16 PhD enrolled students.

ELAP also offers a comprehensive programme of public lectures, seminars, and workshops, and we collaborate with the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) staff in running research seminars, and training courses for ELDP grantees.

ELDP aims to preserve the diversity of human languages by supporting documentation of as many languages as possible, together with their social and cultural contexts, by:

• encouraging fieldwork on endangered languages, especially by younger scholars skilled in language documentation
• fostering the creation and preservation of a body of language resources for use by the linguistic and other social sciences, and language communities

Applications for grants are assessed for their intellectual quality, the degree of language endangerment, the urgency of the issues they raise, their relation to a language’s social and cultural contexts, and their prospects for raising levels of knowledge of the language and expertise in field linguistics, including among members of the language community. Projects should result in documentation materials that are:

• accessible to and usable by members of the language community and the wider scientific community
• as comprehensive as possible, including a range of recordings of language usage from everyday conversation to narrative, oratory, ceremonial speech, and verbal art, as well as transcription and analysis of such materials
• represented and described using standard formats, conventions and theories in order to maximise access and use
• cumulative, to allow data to be annotated and supplemented
• secure against abuse, to protect the rights of the language community
• properly archived, to provide long-term preservation of the data
• contributions to the development of documentation methodology and the understanding of language endangerment