ELAR

ELAR, short for Endangered Languages Archive, is a digital repository established by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. It provides a secure, long-term archive for primary documentation of endangered languages. The repository collects audiovisual recordings, field notes, transcripts, translations, lexica, and related metadata generated by fieldworkers and language communities.

Materials in ELAR are organized into language-specific projects and described with standardized metadata to support discovery, citation, and reuse. Depositors determine access rights and licensing, and some items may be restricted to protect participants or sensitive information, while others are made publicly accessible. The archive supports preservation through format normalization, data management, and regular integrity checks.

Beyond storage, ELAR offers a publishing workflow that enables the documentation to be packaged for dissemination and scholarly citation, often in collaboration with communities. The platform is used by linguists, anthropologists, educators, and community members to support language documentation, revitalization, and research.

ELAR has grown to host thousands of hours of recordings from languages across numerous language families, making it a central resource in language documentation and preservation. It aims to balance open access with community rights, ensuring long-term availability while respecting participants’ consent and cultural sensitivities. ELAR also contributes to developing best practices in data management, metadata standards, and sustainable digital archiving within the field of linguistics.