Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP)

Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) is sponsored by Arcadia Fund (administered by SOAS University of London). This opportunity supports mission-aligned projects and measurable outcomes.

Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) Sample Documentation and description of SamplE LANGUAGE grammar and text collection Project details: Individual Graduate Studentship. Duration: 2012-2014. £XX,XXX Project Summary: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit.

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The SOUND OF Sample Documentation ELDP // PRESERVING ENDANGERED LANGUAGES 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.

• 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 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. 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. We provide grants worldwide for the documentation of endangered languages. Individuals regardless of nationality can apply to our programme.

We offer four types of grant for language documentation, legacy material grants, and rapid grants aimed at assessing the viability of a documentation project. 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.

Public Lecture by Steve C. Levinson We are pleased to announce a public lecture by Steve C. Levinson on “Linguistic Diversity and Why It Matters”.

The lecture is open to all interested attendees, and we warmly welcome colleagues, students, and members of the public to join us. The Public Lecture is part of the Berlin Summer School: Language Science Meets Linguistic Diversity. To know more about the summer school, visit here When: 2 September 2026, from 6:30 pm.

Where: Humboldt University, Dorotheenstraße 24, 10117 Berlin, Room 1. 101. The ELDP grant round for 2027 is now open.

Application deadline: 1 October 2026 Notification of results: April 2027 Apply here by 1st October 2026. 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.

Join one of ELDP's open office hour sessions to ask any questions you might have about applying for a grant! The next sessions will take place on Thursday, 17 and 24 September 2026, at 8 am, 2 pm, or 8 pm (GMT+2). ELDP Archiving Fellowships ELDP is excited to announce a new grant type for ELDP alumni.

The grant offers focused time in Berlin to complete, improve, and deposit documentary collections for long term preservation and access at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR). The Fellowship covers travel and accommodation in Berlin for up to 4 weeks to work with the ELDP and ELAR team. Are you planning to apply for an ELDP grant but need to establish contact with the community?

Do you need to conduct preliminary wordlist elicitation to determine genealogical classification, or to assess the feasibility of a documentation project? The new ELDP Rapid Grant is our new funding scheme for these purposes. Find out more here and apply here .