Sharing Language Diversity Fellowship Grant

The Sharing Language Diversity Fellowship supports Ph.D. students engaged in Indigenous language documentation and data archiving. Funded by the Endangered Language Fund, it encourages sustainable public sharing of linguistic materials, aiming for equitable access to research. With grants up to $30,000, recipients must publicly archive documentation materials within three years, ensuring compliance with community wishes and best practices. This initiative fosters a culture of Open Access in linguistics, benefiting both scholars and Indigenous communities.

Our 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 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.
Funding
Fellowships provide up to $30,000 for expenses related to the documentation of the Indigenous language and the responsible archiving of data from documentation and analysis done by the Fellow. Within 3-years of receiving SLD funding, Fellows must make documentation materials publicly available in an established and recognized repository according to best practices, data sovereignty, and the wishes of the community in which the Fellow conducted the documentation work.

Eligibility

Funds graduate students in their second year, or later, of a graduate program at a US university (in the US) to assist with the student’s efforts to document an Indigenous language. Specifically, the Fellowship aims to support the Open Access archiving of materials in an accessible trusted repository and the sharing of a substantial amount of annotated primary documentation (audio and/or video recordings, annotated transcriptions, and metadata), including material of use to the speaker or signer community. Applicants must have completed two years of study in a graduate program to be eligible. Applicants must be graduate students currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the USA and should not have completed the Ph.D. before the completion of the funded SLD Fellowship project.

Ineligibility

The Endangered Language Fund is unable to support students outside the USA.