Researching and archiving languages that are no longer spoken, or are still spoken by only
a few people, can be a long and involved project. It requires a certain amount of detective …

It's sad I never had a chance to learn to read and write, because I could have written all this
down for you folks and saved you a lot of trouble.(May Wilton, Adnyamathanha woman, early …

Here I present the background to, and a description of, a newly developed database of
historical and contemporary lexical data for Australian languages (Chirila), concentrating on …

A visitor to the Hobart Museum can hear a recording of Fanny Cochrane Smith singing in a
Tasmanian language, made on wax cylinders sometime before 1903.1 This two-and-a-half …

In Victoria the urgency of language reclamation has motivated communities to focus on
using their languages as much and as soon as possible. The analysis of historical sources …

Archives have historically played a central role in the description of endangered languages.
This is not surprising, since there is little sense in collecting data on languages that are …

On the one hand we have never seen as much fieldwork and recording of small and
endangered languages as we have over the past decade. On the other hand linguists are …

The role of data in language documentation is rather different from the way that data is
traditionally treated in language description. For description, the main concern is the …

The documentation and analysis of endangered languages is a core component of the
linguistic endeavour. Language consultants and linguistic researchers collaborate to …

At a time when many of the world's languages are at risk of extinction, the imperative to
document, analyse and teach them before time runs out is very great. At this critical time new …