This is a very complex question! There is no short answer, but if there were, it would include this basic fact: language endangerment generally reflects other pressures, injustices, struggles, or traumas in a community. Languages do not generally become endangered when their communities are stable and thriving. Learn more about language endangerment here. 

There are a few reasons your language might not be on the ELP website:

1. It is not endangered, at least not as measured by the Language Endangerment Index (LEI), the system ELP uses to assess language vitality. This is a good thing – it means your language is relatively strong! If you feel this is a mistake, and your language is endangered as described in the LEI, please contact us.

2. You’re searching for a name or spelling of your language which is different from the names included in our database. We try to include all the different names a language is known by, so people can easily find what they’re looking for. If you notice that the name or spelling you use is missing from our database, please contact us – we would be happy to add it.

3. It is a language which has only recently become known to outside researchers, and we haven’t yet found information about it. If this is the case, please contact us! We would be happy to work with you to add information about your language.

The term “endangered languages” is complicated. It’s a word that has been widely used in this field for several decades, and it’s familiar to audiences in many parts of the world. It’s a term that is meaningful to governments, institutions, NGOs, and funding agencies – some policies, laws, or grants are specifically for “endangered” languages. It’s also a term with lots of baggage. There are many complex and valid reasons that some people and communities do not like the term “endangered” to be used for their languages, such as its focus on extinction, its reliance on biological metaphors of language, or its failure to name the root causes of language loss, among other reasons. Other people and communities choose to describe their languages as “endangered,” and find the word useful. It’s a word that carries multiple meanings, and we acknowledge that it may be an uncomfortable or inappropriate term in some contexts. 

ELP prioritizes using more nuanced and more appropriate language whenever we can, but sometimes we will also use popular terminology to be accessible and understandable to the public. 

ELP currently operates with grants and donations from the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, the First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation, Supporting Indigenous Language Revitalization (SILR), the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Lush Charity Pot, and generous donors like you. In the past, we’ve also received funding from the US National Science Foundation, Google.org, and the Henry Luce Foundation.

No. All our resources and services will always be free.

We’re sorry, but we’re not currently able to offer grants or funding. ELP sends out regular updates on other funding and job opportunities through our social media and email newsletter.

No, ELP is not an archive. Archives have long-term plans to keep materials safe and available for hundreds of years, and are usually part of institutions like tribal governments, universities, museums, etc. The ELP website only has the capacity to share links to materials that have been uploaded on other sites (like Soundcloud, Vimeo, or YouTube) – we don’t have any control over what happens to materials uploaded on other websites, so be careful, and read their terms of service before deciding to upload your language materials there. 

If you are looking for a place to safely store recordings (or other language materials) for a long time, try contacting a reputable language archive, or using a platform like FirstVoices. You can find a partial list of reputable language archives at DELAMAN. You may also wish to visit the Digital Stewardship Curriculum, an educational resource by the Sustainable Heritage Network, for Indigenous institutions working to digitize and store materials of all kinds. You can also find learning resources about archiving in our resource library.

ELP doesn’t hold any rights to user-submitted materials shared on this website – we only have the ability to link to them, or display them on the website.

By adding materials to the ELP site, you are sharing a link to something that is already public on the internet (for example, a video on YouTube). Check the terms of service of the site which hosts those materials – for example, if you upload a video that you recorded to YouTube, you still own that video, but YouTube has the rights to share it, play it for other people, distribute it, etc. We recommend always checking the terms of service for any platform where you are uploading important language materials! Data sovereignty is an important thing to keep in mind as you create, share, and store materials related to your languages. 

We also recommend the Check Before You Tech resource from First Peoples’ Cultural Council, which offers a set of guiding questions around technology and language data. It is available through the ELP website in several languages.