The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) aims to support the documentation and preservation of endangered languages across the globe. This initiative provides grants to individuals worldwide, including linguists, linguistic anthropologists, and community members skilled in linguistic documentation, facilitating the recording of endangered languages to safeguard these languages for future generations.
The program focuses on documenting as many endangered languages as possible, encouraging fieldwork in this area, creating a comprehensive repository for linguistics, social science, and language communities, and ensuring the free accessibility of documented collections. Specifically, the Major Documentation Project (MDP) supports extensive documentation efforts with funding up to €300,000. MDP projects may include fieldwork, payment for researchers, and stipends for graduate students contributing to the linguistic project. Projects are expected to generate accessible digital video and audio recordings, written materials (transcriptions, annotations), and metadata. These materials should serve both the language community and the scientific community, be comprehensive and represented in standard formats, and contribute to the development of documentation methodologies. Eligible projects should involve collaboration, potentially including documenters from within the language communities, local scholars, students from the relevant country, and aim to produce a range of linguistic and cultural materials for both preservation and academic study.