Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) Rapid Grants

Small grant awards offering funding over six months to support initial preliminary work and fieldwork aimed at assessing the viability of a project to document endangered languages.

The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) was founded by the Arcadia Fund to serve humanity by preserving endangered cultural heritage and ecosystems. To date, the ELDP has awarded more than €25 million for the documentation of endangered languages worldwide.

The ELDP, and the associated Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), were based at the School of Advanced Study (SOAS) at the University of London from 2002 until 2021 and are now located at the Berlin Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW). 

The key objectives of ELDP 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 language communities, linguistic and social sciences.
• To make the documentary collections freely available.

ELDP administers a range of grants through its Documentation Grants Programme to support projects to document endangered languages and contribute to its core aim to preserve endangered languages. Funding is given for documentation projects led by individuals such as linguists, linguistic anthropologists and community members with skills in linguistic documentation.

Grantees are able to undertake fieldwork to record speakers of endangered languages on audio and video, compiling a documentary collection of an endangered language or genre. These documentary collections are then archived and preserved and are made freely available through the digital online Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), which is housed at BBAW.

The ELDP Rapid Grants are smaller grant awards that offer funding over six months to support preliminary work for larger projects, such as initial fieldwork aiming to assesss the viability of a documentation project, initial engagement with a language community, and preliminary data collection such as word lists to establish language status and/or genealogical status.

The grants can be used to support focused work on a specific language that is either known to be endangered or where there is evidence that it is likely endangered. They can also be used to support linguistic survey work for areas where the current situation is poorly known but where there is a strong likelihood that endangered languages are spoken/signed.

ELDP especially welcomes applications from documenters from communities speaking/signing endangered languages, local scholars and students from the country where the language is spoken/signed, and collaborative projects.