Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America

Last updated

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a digital repository housed in LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin. AILLA is a digital language archive dedicated to the digitization and preservation of primary data, such as field notes, texts, audio and video recordings, in or about Latin American indigenous languages. AILLA's holdings are available on the Internet and are open to the public wherever privacy and intellectual property concerns are met. AILLA has access portals in both English and Spanish; all metadata are available in both languages, as well as in indigenous languages where possible. [1]

Contents

Purpose

In this global media age, more and more indigenous languages are being superseded by global languages such as Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Frequently, recordings made by researchers such as linguists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists, and by community members and speakers, are the only record of these languages. These recordings might be stored in university offices or in private homes where they are not accessible to others. AILLA provides a permanent home for these recordings in order to make them available to the speakers and to the rest of the world via the Internet.

Archive

The collection currently contains roughly 7,500 hours of archived audio materials, representing more than 300 languages from at least 28 countries. This is supplemented by a significant number of images, videos, and text files. Altogether, the archive contains more than 110,000 individual files (correct as of June 2016).[ citation needed ]

The database of archived materials can be freely searched via both the English and Spanish portals available on the AILLA webpage, [2] as well as the Open Languages Archives Community. Direct access to archived recordings requires registration and sometimes needs permission as specified by the depositor. Downloads are free of charge. [3]

A large part of the project is the digitization of valuable analog recordings of languages and cultures from the Latin America that will otherwise deteriorate or be lost forever. Researchers whose materials are represented in these collections include Terrence Kaufman, Lyle Campbell, and Nora England.

Analog recordings are digitized at the highest possible fidelity to ensure high-quality digital files result. The current international archive standard for PCM audio files is 24-bit resolution and a sample rate of 96 kHz. AILLA employs the same standard to ensure that digital copies of the highest practicable fidelity are produced.[ citation needed ]

Affiliations

AILLA is funded by the College of Liberal Arts and the University of Texas Libraries at The University of Texas at Austin. AILLA's main office is located at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. The archive is currently headed by Susan Smythe Kung, Joel Sherzer, Anthony C. Woodbury, and Patience Epps. [4]

Other information

AILLA was founded in 2000 by Joel Sherzer, professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin. The archive is a member of the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN). [5] AILLA is an archive of record for the Documenting Endangered Languages program of the National Science Foundation. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digitization</span> Converting information into digital form

Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital format. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document, or signal obtained by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal. In modern practice, the digitized data is in the form of binary numbers, which facilitates processing by digital computers and other operations, but digitizing simply means "the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format"; the decimal or any other number system can be used instead.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab</span> American record label

Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab is a record label that specialized in the production of audiophile issues. The company produces reissued vinyl LP records, compact discs, and Super Audio CDs and other formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mel Gussow</span> Theater critic (1933–2005)

Melvyn Hayes "Mel" Gussow was an American theater critic, movie critic, and author who wrote for The New York Times for 35 years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SigmaTel</span> 1993–2008 American system-on-a-chip company

SigmaTel, Inc., was an American system-on-a-chip (SoC), electronics and software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that designed AV media player/recorder SoCs, reference circuit boards, SoC software development kits built around a custom cooperative kernel and all SoC device drivers including USB mass storage and AV decoder DSP, media player/recorder apps, and controller chips for multifunction peripherals. SigmaTel became Austin's largest IPO as of 2003 when it became publicly traded on NASDAQ. The company was driven by a talented mix of electrical and computer engineers plus other professionals with semiconductor industry experience in Silicon Hills, the number two IC design region in the United States, after Silicon Valley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emberá languages</span> Chocoan dialect continuum of Colombia and Panama

Emberá is a dialect continuum spoken by 100,000 people in northwestern Colombia and southeastern Panama. It belongs to the Choco language family.

etree

etree, or electronic tree, is a music community created in the summer of 1998 for the online trading of live concert recordings. etree pioneered the standards for distributing lossless audio on the net and only permits its users to distribute the music of artists that allow the free taping and trading of their music.

Language documentation is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community. Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization. This record can be public or private depending on the needs of the community and the purpose of the documentation. In practice, language documentation can range from solo linguistic anthropological fieldwork to the creation of vast online archives that contain dozens of different languages, such as FirstVoices or OLAC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radio Venceremos</span>

Radio Venceremos was an 'underground' radio network of the anti-government Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) during the Salvadoran Civil War. The station "specialized in ideological propaganda, acerbic commentary, and pointed ridicule of the government". The radio station was founded by Carlos Henríquez Consalvi (Santiago).

Kumeyaay (Kumiai), also known as Central Diegueño, Kamia, 'Iipay Aa, and Campo, is the Native American language spoken by the Kumeyaay people of southern San Diego and Imperial counties in California as well as five Kumiai communities in Baja California Norte, MX.

The Kuikuro are an indigenous people from the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. Their language, Kuikuro, is a part of the Cariban language family. The Kuikuro have many similarities with other Xingu tribes. They have a population of 592 in 2010, up from 450 in 2002.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Achawa language</span> Arawakan language of Colombia

Achagua, or Achawa, is an Arawakan language spoken in the Meta Department of Colombia, similar to Piapoco. It is estimated that 250 individuals speak the language, many of whom also speak Piapoco or Spanish.

Frances Esther Karttunen, also known as Frances Ruley Karttunen, is an American academic linguist, historian and author.

Nora Clearman England was an American linguist, Mayanist, and Dallas TACA Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focused on the grammar of Mayan languages and contemporary Mayan language politics.

Cholón (Cholona), also known as Seeptsá and Tsinganeses, is a language of Peru. It was spoken near Uchiza, from Tingo María to Valle in the Huallaga River valley of Huanuco and San Martín regions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benson Latin American Collection</span> Comprehensive collection of Latin American materials

The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection is part of the University of Texas Library system in partnership with the Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS), located in Austin, Texas, and named for the historian and bibliographer, Nettie Lee Benson (1905-1993). It is one of the world's most comprehensive collections of Latin American materials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Smythe Kung</span> American linguist

Susan Smythe Kung is the Manager of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin. Kung is a linguist who specializes in endangered language archiving and the Huehuetla Tepehua language of Hidalgo, Mexico. She earned her doctorate in linguistics in 2007 from the University of Texas at Austin, and her dissertation, A Descriptive Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua won the Mary R. Haas Book Award from the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Kung is the President of DELAMAN, the Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archiving Network from 2016-2018 and is a founding member of the Linguistics Data Interest Group (LDIG) of the Research Data Alliance.

Megan Jane Crowhurst is an Australian- and Canadian-raised linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.

Helen Aristar-Dry is an American linguist who currently serves as the series editor for SpringerBriefs in Linguistics. Most notably, from 1991 to 2013 she co-directed The LINGUIST List with Anthony Aristar. She has served as principal investigator or co-Principal Investigator on over $5,000,000 worth of research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She retired as Professor of English Language and Literature from Eastern Michigan University in 2013.

Joel Fred Sherzer was an American anthropological linguist known for his research with the Guna people of Panama and his focus on verbal art and discourse-centered approaches to linguistic research. He co-founded the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Sherzer completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and thereafter taught at the University of Texas at Austin for his entire career.

Patience Louise "Pattie" Epps is an American linguistics professor and researcher at the University of Texas at Austin whose main research focus is on the Naduhup language family, which consists of four extant languages in the Amazon.

References

  1. "About". ailla.utexas.org. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  2. "AILLA". www.ailla.utexas.org. Retrieved 2018-02-28.
  3. "The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America". ailla-legacy.lib.utexas.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  4. "OLAC - Archive details". www.language-archives.org. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  5. "Open Language Archives Community". www.language-archives.org. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  6. "AILLA - Collection Guides". ailla.utexas.org. Retrieved 2024-09-09.