Sharing Language Diversity Fellowship Grant

Sharing Language Diversity Fellowship Grant is sponsored by Endangered Language Fund. Supports Ph. D.

students engaged in Indigenous language documentation and data archiving, encouraging sustainable public sharing of linguistic materials.

Sharing Language Diversity Fellowship — The Endangered Language Fund Sharing Language Diversity Fellowship You can click here to view the 2026 application guidelines and instructions. You can access the required cover form here. From 2020 Kodi Language Legacies grant to Yustinus Ghanggo Ate The Endangered Language Fund (ELF) is pleased to announce the Sharing Language Diversity Fellowship.

The Fellowship is meant to support the research of Ph. D. students who have completed two years of study in a graduate program in Linguistics and related disciplines, and who are engaged in the documentation of Indigenous languages and the archiving of linguistic data as part of their PhD graduate studies.

The primary purpose of this fellowship is to encourage emerging linguists, in collaboration with their Indigenous partners, to responsibly share annotated materials in a sustainable public forum for equitable access to ongoing and finished research, both for community members and for other scholars. This fellowship aims to create a culture of archiving and Open Access sharing in linguistics, as is common in many other disciplines.

In the interests of equity and discovery, the grant is meant to contribute to the normalizing of the archiving of language and cultural materials in trusted repositories on an ongoing basis and making not just results but also data freely accessible to the public, with appropriate community approval. Thanks to a generous donation from Arienne M.

Dwyer, ELF is able to fund graduate students in their second year, or later, of a graduate program at a US university (in the US) to assist with the student’s efforts to document an Indigenous language.

Specifically, the Fellowship aims to support the Open Access archiving of materials in an accessible trusted repository and the sharing of a substantial amount of annotated primary documentation (audio and/or video recordings, annotated transcriptions, and metadata), including material of use to the speaker or signer community. Applicants must have completed two years of study in a graduate program to be eligible.

Fellowships provide up to $30,000 for expenses related to the documentation of the Indigenous language and the responsible archiving of data from documentation and analysis done by the Fellow.

Within 3-years of receiving SLD funding, Fellows must make documentation materials publicly available in an established and recognized repository according to best practices, data sovereignty, and the wishes of the community in which the Fellow conducted the documentation work. From 2020 Kodi Language Legacies grant to Yustinus Ghanggo Ate Read Here About our SLDF Awardees!

​Trent Jordan Ukasick, University of Washington, “Documenting Gyegu Tibetan” Trent will work with speakers of Gyegu Tibetan, a dialect of Khams Tibetan (khg) spoken in in Gyegu, Yushu City, Qinghai in the People’s Republic of China. This project will create an archived audio and video corpus of Gyegu Tibetan which will contain family and community histories, example sentences, dialogue, and the speech of older community members.

These materials will be useful to the community in a variety of ways. First and foremost, it will preserve valuable cultural heritage that will be accessible to future generations. In addition, it will preserve information about the linguistic structure of the language.

This information can be used to create pedagogical materials to aid in future educational or revitalization efforts. ​Elizabeth “Lizzie” Goodrich, University of Colorado Boulder, “Dixhsa Community Archiving and Literature Project” Goodrich’s work on Dixhsa will explore required TenseAspectMood-marking on verbs and verbal Aktionsart.

In order to collect research data, Goodrich, will work with speakers to record texts that will become literary resources for the community and for broader publication with accompanying video and audio. All audio, video, and accompanying text files will be archived in the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas at Austin.

To make the archive accessible to community members in Teotitlán del Valle, Goodrich will hold workshops demonstrating how to access and set up an account on the AILLA site. An instructional document will also be available in hard copy.

For use outside of the workshop, Goodrich will create instructional videos, which will be posted to the Teotitlán del Valle Facebook page a popular way to circulate information locally, as Internet is widely available. Louward Allen M. Zubiri, University of Hawai’i, “Acquisition of Bikol languages” Zubiri will conduct a corpus study investigating the input to and output of multilingual Bikol children.

Zubiri will contribute to a gap in Philippine linguistics and build the Bikol Early Language Corpus, a collection of multilingual audio recordings that include (i) parental speech, (ii) child-directed speech, and (iii) child speech. The goal of the project is to document the language-in-use of 1;0 to 6;0 children of Bikol heritage and their families.

The documentation will involve gathering phonetic, lexical, and syntactical data and include the languages in their linguistic repertoire. The languages included in the corpus are 1) the Bikol languages, 2) Tagalog, and 3) English. Zubiri wishes to represent the reality of linguistic practices, especially since language documentation is "the endeavor to create long-lasting, multipurpose records of language-in-use in different genres".

The project will also employ two archiving plans. For language data from family units and thus involve children, transcripts of child-related data (ex. parent speech, child-directed speech, and child speech) will be archived in Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES).