Particularly for Indigenous Peoples, language revitalization is about connections: (re)establishing and renewing intergenerational relationships to lands, ancestors, human and beyond-human relatives, lifeways, worldviews, and social, cultural, and spiritual ways of knowing and being.

Language revitalization supports wellness: it’s linked to better mental, physical, and emotional health in Indigenous, endangered, and minoritized language communities. Language revitalization upholds human rights and the self-determination of Indigenous Peoples, as affirmed in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

Sustaining language diversity means sustaining a world with a greater diversity of knowledge, ways of living sustainably, and understandings of what it means to be human. A better world for languages is a better world for all. 

People around the world are working in many different ways to revitalize and reclaim their languages. Visit ELP's Language Revitalization Directory to explore a global map of revitalization efforts, and learn more about each of them.

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.

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.

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.