ELDP: Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (IPF) Grant

ELDP: Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (IPF) Grant

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP)
Amount: Up to €250,000
Last Updated: September 02, 2025

Summary

The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) offers the Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (IPF) to support researchers documenting endangered languages worldwide. This grant allows for fieldwork, enabling grantees to collect audio and video data for archiving. Successful applicants will demonstrate a strong academic background and a clear mentorship relationship at their host institution. The maximum funding available is 250,000€, aimed at fostering comprehensive language documentation accessible to both the language community and the scientific community.

Overview

Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) Goals The goal of the Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) is to support the documentation and preservation of endangered languages globally. To this end we give grants worldwide to individuals to document endangered languages. We provide funding for documentation projects led by individuals such as linguists, linguistic anthropologists and community members with skills in linguistic documentation. The funds allow grantees to undertake fieldwork to record speakers/signers of endangered languages on audio and video, compiling a documentary collection of an endangered language. These documentary collections are then archived and preserved and are made freely available through the digital online Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR). Objectives Our key objectives are: to support the documentation of as many endangered languages as possibleto encourage fieldwork on endangered languagesto create a repository of resources for linguistics, social science, and the language communitiesto make the documentary collections freely available Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (IPF) For an IPF ELDP expects: a prior track record of documentary work, archiving and research publications by the PIa clear relationship to the host institution in terms of intellectual relationships, as well as academic and technical supporta clear mentoring relationship between a staff member at the host institution and the PIclear strategies for both documentation and research for the period of the award. The maximum award is 250,000€. Potential Projects Outcomes of funded projects should include a collection of materials such as digital video and audio recordings, texts of various kinds. Projects should ideally result in documentation materials that are: accessible to and usable by members of the language community and the wider scientific communityas comprehensive as possible, including a range of recordings of language usage from everyday conversation to narrative, oratory, ceremonial speech, and verbal art, as well as transcription, annotation and analysis of such materialsrepresented and described using standard formats, conventions and theories in order to maximise access and useflexible and cumulative, to allow data to be annotated and supplementedin archivable form to provide for long-term preservation of the datacontributions to the on-going development of documentation methodology Projects should create materials in several types of media: videoaudioimageswritten (e.g. transcription, annotation, notes, description/analysis)metadata (structured data about the primary and secondary materials) Together, these will form the language documentation and may contain a range of linguistic materials, such as: spoken language in a variety of styles and contexts, recorded (in video and/or audio), with transcriptions, translations and notes and annotationswritten texts in a variety of styles, with transcriptions, translations and annotationsrelevant sociological and cultural informationformal linguistic resources such as dictionary and sketch-grammarpedagogical materials

Eligibility

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website. Who Can Apply?ELDP welcomes applications from researchers of any nationality to undertake projects in any part of the world. For the IPF grants we anticipate that all postdoctoral fellowship applicants will be: academically junior researchers and/or at an early stage in their academic career, with qualifications in linguistics and experience in linguistic fieldwork; will propose projects that are undertaken by teams or individuals; and will have secured their PhD no more than five years prior to the proposed start date of this fellowship.Successful applicants’ PhD dissertations must be submitted and approved by the time of the start date of the award.IPF awardees are required to hold their fellowship at an institution other than the institution where their PhD was awarded. If an applicant chooses to hold their fellowship at the same institution where their PhD was awarded, they must provide sound and convincing reasons for this decision. Although IPFs may fund team-based research, the primary grantee is the principal investigator.To apply to our program you need to be affiliated with a host institution such as a university, which is a registered entity and has experience in administering grants.Note that all grant funds are paid to an accredited institution which administers the grant. Attention is especially paid to these criteria:the degree of endangerment of the language(s) and the urgency of the documentation the nature of the project as a contribution to language documentation the training and preparation of the applicant(s) for the proposed project the goals of the project and whether they can be realistically achieved a clear methodology for project work a clear justification of equipment in relation to the methodology attention to ethical issues attention to archiving and the open-access requirement clear evidence of institutional support (what the institution will provide for you).

Ineligibility

The Principal Investigator must not be a director, owner, or similar, of the host institution.This means that directors, founders and heads of financial administration at the host institution cannot apply for grants.Although documentation and revitalisation are linked, projects aimed only at revitalisation without significant emphasis on documentation will not be funded.Note that we do not fund overhead costs, parental and sickness pay, salaries for established academic staff where research is an integral part of their existing salaried post (other than in exceptional cases), top-up salaries for established academic staff, including funding of non-salaried vacation periods, e.g. summer salaries.Co-applicants are not allowed for IPF grants.