Endangered Languages Week · Open Day
Thursday 12 May 2011

Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song
The Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song project focuses on the way tone, vowel length and voice quality work in several dialects of Dinka. We are also interested in how different dialects relate to each other, and how tone etc. are expressed in song and writing. The project has a strong documentation component. We are recording and comparing speech and song and try to understand how the structure of language and the structure of song are related to each other. We are particularly interested in how people from different areas and with different beliefs see their creative powers in word and song as being skills and attributes that are important to their society and culture.

Presenters: Bert Remijsen and Angela Impey will available to talk about their work on the project

CELC (Cambridge Endangered Languages and Cultures Group)
The Cambridge Group for Endangered Languages and Cultures (CELC) pursues an interdisciplinary approach to the theory, methodology and practice of endangered language and culture documentation.

Presenters: Elena Pala, Natalia Petrovskaia and Thomas Godard

EAP (Endangered Archives Programme)
The Programme's aim is to contribute to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide. The main means by which the Programme achieves this is through the creation of digital or microfilm copies of endangered materials and the relocation of the originals to a safe local archival home

Presenters: Lynda Barraclough and Alex Hailey

ELAP (Endangered Languages Academic Programme)
Meet staff and students from SOAS’ unique postgraduate programme in endangered languages

ELAR (Endangered Languages Archive)
A demonstration by the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Archive

ELDP (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme)
ELDP has funded over 200 teams to document endangered languages across the world. Grantees will be attending the Open Day to talk about their research

FEL (Foundation for Endangered Languages)
FEL aims to raise awareness of endangered languages, both inside and outside the communities where they are spoken, through all channels and media

International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS)
The iSLanDS Institute at the University of Central Lancashire documents endangered sign languages in small village communities with hereditary deafness. Our research highlights the special importance of these little-known languages and the unique linguistic and cultural setting of "deaf villages".

Presenters: Ulrike Zeshan and Conny Devos

The 300 Languages Project
The 300 Languages Project is a special effort by The Rosetta Project, part of The Long Now Foundation, to begin the construction of a universal corpus of human language by collecting parallel text and audio in the world's 300 most widely-spoken languages. The resulting collection will contain thousands of volunteer-contributed public domain text documents and audio recordings which will be made available to researchers and the public alike via The Internet Archive, a free online digital library.

Smithsonian Institution
The Recovering Voices initiative capitalizes on the vast collections (http://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/) and archives (http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/) of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History to support diversity in languages and knowledge systems.

Presenters: Gabriela Pérez Báez

Surrey Morphology Group
The research of the SMG combines the investigation of grammatical categories in a broad sample of languages with the use of explicit formal and statistical frameworks for the expression of typological and theoretical generalizations. For more information, visit the Surrey Morphology Group website.

Presenters:

• Claire Turner, who works with Salishan languages spoken in British Columbia;
• Sebastian Fedden, who works on Alor and Pantar languages spoken in eastern Indonesia. His PhD was on a Papuan language Mian;
• Enrique Palancar, who works on Oto-Pamean languages of Mexico;
• Marina Chumakina, who works on Daghestanian language (Russia).

WOLP (World Oral Literature Project)
The World Oral Literature Project is an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record. The project has been established to support local communities and committed fieldworkers engaged in the collection and preservation of all forms of oral literature by providing funding for original research, alongside training in fieldwork and digital archiving methods.

Presenters: Mark Turin and Claire Wheeler

Brill
Founded in 1863, Brill is a well-established international academic publishing house with offices in Leiden, the Netherlands and Boston, USA. Over the years Brill has gradually built up a strong reputation in the field of Languages & Linguistics. Publications focus on Endangered Languages, Afro-asiatic, Asian, African and Indo-European Languages.

Presenters: Sasha Goldstein

Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is a world-leader in Linguistics, publishing across the full spectrum of the discipline. Series such as the market-leading Cambridge Studies in Linguistics sit alongside bestsellers by internationally renowned authors such as Noam Chomsky, Andrew Radford and David Crystal. We publish the best-known textbook brand in the field, as well as cutting-edge research and prestigious reference works, on subjects ranging from sociolinguistics to sign language, from phonetics to discourse analysis, and from syntax to semantics.

Presenters: Helen Barton

Francis Boutle Publishers
Francis Boutle Publishers are a small independent publishers. They have begun an ambitious project to create anthologies of all the lesser used languages of Europe: so far they have published anthologies in Breton, Manx, Galician - with Channel Islands Norman this month. This year they plan to publish anthologies in Cornish, Scottish Gaelic and Esperanto.

Presenters: Clive Boutle

John Benjamins Publishing Company
John Benjamins Publishing Company is an independent, family-owned academic publisher headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Founded over 40 years ago by John and Claire Benjamins, the company is currently under the general management of their daughter Seline Benjamins. Over the years JB has been firmly rooted in every imaginable subfield of Language and Linguistics. Further fields of focus are Cognitive Science, Psychology, (Contemporary) Philosophy, Terminology, Information Design, Literary Studies and Art History.

Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press aims to publish the best and most exciting work in linguistics for scholars and students at all levels. We ask our authors to do their best to make their work as accessible as possible to researchers in related fields. Working closely with OUP in New York we cover every aspect of the discipline

London's Language Landscape
SOAS Linguistics Department students will be interviewing members of the public who speak another language. For more information about their activities visit London's Language Landscape

Presenters: Candide Simard, Karolina Grzech, Teresa Poeta, Samantha Goodchild, Thomas A. F. Ritchie, Nicholas Stallman, Caspar Jordan, Anissa Aziz Safi, Connor Youngberg

Meet an Endangered Language
Presentations throughout the day about different endangered languages. Please visit Meet an Endangered Language for more information about these talks

SOAS Radio
SOAS Radio will be broadcasting programmes throughout Endangered Languages Week. Tune in to listen to interviews with the SOAS MA Linguistics Students and Curator of Linguistics at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, Gabriela Pérez Báez

Makepeace Productions
Make Peace Productions will playing excerpts from their recent film We Still Live Here
Please visit the Film Day page if you would like to watch this film, and others during Endangered Languages Week