The world's linguistic diversity is severely underrepresented in research on cognitive and neural aspects of language processing, with great consequences for our understanding of the relationship between language, cognition, and the human brain. The practical challenges of carrying out neurophysiological (but also behavioral) experiments under…

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

We collaborated to investigate humor in the existing corpus of Kere (ISO639-3: sst). This collaboration was a useful test of the Kere corpus and led to the rediscovery of unarchived video recordings, which contained important contextual information. These videos had been deprioritized in the original deposit, but they contained important…

We present a new corpus design for multi-lingual corpora that involve intra-speaker variation in different situational-functional contexts, including primarily spoken but also the written mode, with the aim towards enhancing language documentation efforts and resources. We illustrate how this comparative design and the resulting cross-culturally…

St. Lawrence Island Yupik is an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. In this paper, we describe our work on Yupik jointly leveraging computational morphology and linguistic fieldwork, outlining the multilayer virtuous cycle that we continue to refine in our work to document and build tools for the language. After developing a…

This paper discusses levels of access in language archives and their implications for assessment. In the absence of well-established criteria, part of the evaluation of language archives is often based on accessibility; roughly, the more "unrestricted" or "open access" content, the better the archive. In this paper, I argue…

This article presents LingView (https://github.com/BrownCLPS/LingView), a web interface for viewing FLEx and ELAN files, optionally time-synced with corresponding audio or video files. While FLEx and ELAN are useful tools for many linguists, the resulting annotated files are often inaccessible to the general public. Here, we describe a data…

The purpose of this article is to examine the way community depositors can utilize Facebook to promote increased interaction with their archived language collections. The Facebook groups we are observing are run by individuals who have deposited language materials with the University of North Texas' Computational Resource for South Asian Languages…

The world harbours a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. The increased urgency has led to the development of several global endangerment databases and a more fine-grained understanding…

In contrast to French, the vast majority of regional languages of France can be considered as under-resourced. In this article, we present the results of a research project aiming to produce annotated resources for three regional languages of France: Alsatian, Occitan, and Picard. These languages cover three different language families (Germanic…

Users of digital language archives face a number of barriers when trying to discover and reuse the materials preserved in the digital collections created by current language documentation projects. These barriers include sparse descriptive metadata throughout many collections and the prevalence of audio-video materials that are impervious to…

This paper presents a workflow integrating the linguistic software ELAN and FLEx. This workflow allows the user to move between these two software applications to refine the transcription, translation, and annotation of the speech of multiple participants. The workflow also enables the addition of multiple writing systems for vernacular and…

Digital language data provide accessible and enduring records for world languages. While legacy data collections may offer new insights into small or endangered languages, their digitization can raise practical challenges in terms of navigating vast databases of files with limited metadata. This paper demonstrates the practical benefits of…

This paper explores the application of quantitative methods to study the effect of various factors on phonetic word duration in ten languages. Data on most of these languages were collected in fieldwork aiming at documenting spontaneous speech in mostly endangered languages, to be used for multiple purposes, including the preservation of cultural…

SLEXIL (Software Linking ELAN XML to Illuminated Language) is a web application designed to allow users to create animated HTML files from time-aligned transcriptions made in ELAN. Unlike earlier projects with similar goals, SLEXIL is a zero-installation web app developed strictly on user-centred principles, designed with the goal of transferring…