AALLED presentation: Africa Latin America Endangered Languages

The project “Endangered Languages of Latin America and Africa : Description, Documentation and Typology” situates itself in the new problematic of Documentation – Description – Archiving (DDA) of Endangered Languages (EL) which is concerned with the preservation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage on the world level and with the emergence of a new approach to Linguistics, known as Documentary Linguistics.
The project combines the expertise of two teams from the DDL (Americanists and Africanists) and draws from the experience of a large number of researchers organised in an international network. It builds upon research dynamics already set in motion and upon a well-established collaboration between University (Lyon, France) and research laboratory (CNRS) which offers the perspective of both recruiting and supervising students and linguists ready to orient themselves towards the problematic of DDA of Endangered Languages.

The project is conceived within the activities of an international network of linguists, specialists of the languages of the Latin American and African continents and/or specialists of DDA of EL, with an emphasis on strengthening cooperation between European Institutions dealing with these themes.

- to develop a systematic approach to a new discipline recognised today worldwide, but which still does not have many institutional bases with the academic world and certainly not yet in France;

- to contribute to the production of new linguistic descriptions, in the context of documentation projects to be associated to proper archiving

- to contribute to linguistic typological research, in association with special projects reflecting the interests and specializations of members of the laboratory, some already ongoing others starting, depending on the data to be collected in specific fields (themes related to the notion of linguistic “complexity”, in the domains of tonology systems, nominal classification systems, the expression of space, verbal valency systems, etc…)

Last Update 24/01/2008