Documentation Grants

About ELDP

The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) is funded by Arcadia (previously known as the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund), which provided £20 million pounds for the Project, including £17 million for grant funding.

In its first five years, ELDP awarded up to £1.4 million in grants each year, and has now funded over 150 teams to document endangered languages across the world. Funded projects can be found from the box at the right.

Updates for 2009

Following a review of the first five years of operation, a new management and organisational structure is being introduced. New funding cycles and new grant types have been announced, and new application and guidance forms and are being prepared.

To meet the demand for support for language documentation work, ELDP offers two granting cycles in 2009:

• Cycle 1 is targeted at specific granting categories, with an expedited schedule, opening on 1 March.
• Cycle 2 is a full granting cycle. Applications are invited in all categories, opening on 15 May.

Click here for further information on new grant types and how to apply

Goals of the programme

Key objectives of ELDP are

• to support the documentation of as many endangered languages as possible
• to encourage fieldwork on endangered languages, especially by younger scholars with skills in language documentation
• to create a repository of resources for the linguistic, social science, and the language communities