Language Endangerment

Today there are about 6,500 languages spoken worldwide and at least half of those will have fallen silent by the end of this century. In many areas of the world, globalisation creates economic, political and social pressures on people who in response give up their traditional ways of life, find new sources of income and move to cities. This causes speakers to cease speaking their traditional languages, and turn to other, typically more dominant languages to foster economic and social mobility for their children.


While throughout human history speakers have shifted to other languages, the speed of this development has increased dramatically over the past century. Each of these languages expresses the unique knowledge, history and worldview of their speaker communities, and each language is a specially evolved variation of the human capacity for language. Many of these disappearing languages have never been described or recorded and so the richness of human linguistic diversity is disappearing without a trace.

The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme responds to this loss by supporting researchers to document endangered languages worldwide.


Our key objectives are
• to support the documentation of as many endangered languages as possible
• to encourage fieldwork on endangered languages
• to create a repository of resources for linguistics, the social sciences, and the language communities themselves
• to make the documentary collections freely available

What we do

We support the documentation and preservation of endangered languages through granting, training and outreach activities. The collections compiled through our funding are freely accessible at the Endangered Languages Archive.

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About us

The ELDP was founded in 2002 with a donation from the Arcadia fund to SOAS University of London. In 2021 ELDP moved to the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. ELDP has funded over 500 language documentation projects globally so far.

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Our Grants

We provide grants world wide for the documentation of endangered languages. Individuals regardless of nationality or host institution can apply to our programme. We offer four different grant types and run one granting cycle per year opening 15th July each year.

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Projects

Our focus is the linguistic documentation of endangered languages and making the digital collections freely available online. In addition we support capacity building through training in London and in country.

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ELDP DOCUMENTATION PROJECTS

TO MAP

NEWS AND EVENTS

Auftaktveranstaltung der Yekmal Akademie

ELAR und die Yekmal Akademie gGmbH laden ein zur Auftaktveranstaltung der Yekmal Akademie ein.

Datum: 10.10.2025
Uhrzeit: 14:00-20:00 Uhr
Ort: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Einsteinsaal im 5. OG, Jägerstrasse 22-23, 10117 Berlin

Anmeldung

Launch of the "Family Matters" exhibition

Launch of the year-long exhibit “Family Matters”
video installation featuring communities talking about family and their lives. Join us for the launch of the exhibition on 2 October 2025, 6pm at the Humboldt Forum.
The launch will start at 6pm, with a round table at 7.30 pm and a quick tour around the temporary exhibition area at 8 pm.

Date and time: Thursday, 2 October 2025, 6pm
Venue: Humboldt Forum Foyer and other exibition spaces on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd floors, Schlossplatz, 10178 Berlin

Learn more here

Talk: Simon Musgrave on The Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA)

Join us for a talk by Simon Musgrave on The Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA).

Simon Musgrave is Research Support and Training Lead for the Language Data Commons of Australia and an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.
He will speak about the work of the Language Data Commons of Australia.

Date: Tuesday, 7th October 2025
Time: 2pm
Venue: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wisschenschaften, Jägerstr. 22-23, 10117 Berlin, Room 226, 2nd floor

Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages

ELAR is excited to invite you to the Festival of Endangered Languages at the Barbican Centre in London!
Sound artist Jamie Perera created an exciting audio trail and a sound installation from ELAR recordings.

Date: 1st to 31st October 2025
Venue: Across the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS, UK

Learn more about the Voiced Festival
Learn more about the Audio trail

ELDP 2026 Grant Round is open – 16 June 2025

The ELDP grant round for 2026 is open for applications. Information about grant types and application process can be found here. Visit our project pages for the types of projects we have funded and the Endangered Language Archive for the resulting digital collections.