Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages (LTIEL)
The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages (LTIEL) is an organization based in Salem, Oregon, United States that scientifically documents endangered languages, and assists communities with maintaining and revitalizing knowledge of their native languages. The institute is led by two linguists, Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson and Dr. K. David Harrison (Swarthmore College). Those desiring to donate to LTIEL are encouraged to "adopt a language."



One of the Institute's major projects involves training indigenous youth who are native speakers of their communities' traditional languages to record and document their elders' languages, in order to improve documentation of those languages and to "build pride" among speakers. In addition, LTIEL, in cooperation with their daughter project (supported by National Geographic), Enduring Voices, popularized the Language Hotspots model in 2007. The Living Tongues Institute has is producing a line of Talking Online Dictionaries for a range of languages. The original one was built for Tuvan (Siberia, Turkic). The Tuvan-English online talking dictionary is hosted on a Linux server at Swarthmore College with full backup and RAID array redundancy. It is programmed in the MySQL database management system, which support multi-user access. It is a searchable, talking, on-line dictionary with searchability functions for both English (Latin)-literate and Tuvan (Cyrillic)-literate users. It currently has 7,482 lexical entries, over 75% of which have streamable soundfiles and about 5% have pictures. There is also an ongoing project for creating a Siletz Dee-ni (Oregon, Athabaskan) online dictionary, as well as ones for Remo (India, Munda), Ho (India, Munda), Matukar (Papua New Guinea, Austronesian), and Chamacoco (Paraguay, Zamucoan).

LTIEL has several other ongoing projects documenting Ös/Middle Chulym (Turkic) in Russian Siberia and the Munda languages of Eastern and Central India. The institute has also worked on Eleme and Baan (Ogoni) in Nigeria, and Kallawaya, a Bolivian language of the Andean healers. In addition, they have an ethnographic and language documenting project for the Altai-Sayan languages (Tofa, Todzhu, Dukha, Tsengel, Tuvan, and Monchak)of Siberia and Mongolia. Finally, Dr. Anderson and Dr. Harrison from LTIEL were featured the acclaimed documentary film The Linguists.

Links for LTIEL
LTIEL's website

LTIEL's Facebook