Indigenous Language Institute Collaborates with Google on the Endangered Languages Project

Santa Fe, NM, June 21 – Today marks the launch of the Endangered Languages Project, a collaboration between the Indigenous Language Institute (ILI), other members of the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, and Google, which includes a website for people to find and share the most up-to-date and comprehensive information about endangered languages. The site address is http://www.endangeredlanguages.com.

ILI is a member of a new coalition of organizations committed to preserving endangered languages, the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, which backs this project.

“ILI is proud to be associated with Google on this important initiative, which we believe will be of immense use to Native Language teachers, activists and learners,” says ILI Board of Directors President Gerald L. Hill (Oneida).

The Indigenous Language Institute has worked with Google since 2011 to make available audio clips, video clips and other language resources for this site. ILI hopes that this project will help build a centralized, dynamic catalogue of information on best practices and language data that will be useful to revitalization efforts.

ILI is serving on the project’s Advisory Committee, helping with moderation and helping build a sustainable future for the project. Visitors to the site will have access to language data, audio, text and video samples as well as bibliographic resources. Speakers of languages and academics will be able to use this site to share their languages, research information, upload samples and comments and communicate with each other. Through knowledge sharing, community members and scholars can learn about and share best practices to improve their efforts to preserve endangered languages.

“I would like to thank Google for this opportunity to address the importance of keeping our Native languages alive,” says Wes Studi (Cherokee), ILI honorary board member.

The Indigenous Language Institute (ILI) is a non-profit organization in Santa Fe, New Mexico that provides vital language related services to Native communities so that their individual identities, traditional wisdom and values are passed on to future generations in their original languages. ILI’s guiding philosophy is to help create speakers of the endangered languages while we still have speakers left. For information about ILI, visit http://www.ilinative.org