Endangered Language Fund – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Sharing Language Diversity Fellowship, Endangered Language Fund, New Haven, CT, USA. Deadline: 23 May 2025.

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.

Language Legacies Grants, Endangered Language Fund. Deadline: 15 March 2024.

The Language Legacies grant program supports documentation and revitalization efforts throughout the world. It is open to community members and researchers from any country (with the exception of those who are eligible for the Native Voices Endowment grants). An academic degree is not required, but the application must provide evidence that the applicant can achieve the stated goals. Grants are for one year and average around $2,000 (US).

The Endangered Language Fund is a 501(c)3 founded in 1996 with the goal of supporting endangered language preservation and documentation projects. Their main mechanism for supporting work on endangered languages has been funding grants to individuals, tribes, and museums. ELF’s grants have promoted work in over 60 countries and have funded a wide range of projects, from the development indigenous radio programs in South Dakota, to recording of the last living oral historian of the Shor language of western Siberia, to the establishment of orthographies and literacy materials to be used by endangered language teaching programs all over the world.

The UN International Year of Indigenous Languages was expanded to the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032) to draw global attention on the critical situation of many indigenous languages and to mobilize stakeholders and resources for their preservation, revitalization and promotion.