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.

The 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
  
  

Since 2003 ELDP has funded about 300 documentation projects around the world. Funded projects can be found from the box at the right or on our project page. The results of completed documentation projects funded by ELDP are made available by our archive ELAR

In 2012, ELDP awarded over £1.100.000 for a range of different documentary projects. The range encompasses projects such as the documentation of Ersu, Tosu, and Lizu, languages spoken in China of which Tosu has only four elderly speakers left; the documentation of how children learn Nihalli, a linguistic isolate spoken in India or the documentation of Cameroonian Sign Language. Outlines of all funded projects can be found on our project pages.

Grant cycles

Each year ELDP provides a range of different grants for the documentation of endangered languages. The grant cycle for 2013 closed on 15th of January 2013. The next grant cycle will open on 15th October 2013 and will close on 15th January 2014.

Contact information

If you have any questions or require more detailed information please get in touch with us at eldp@soas.ac.uk