Over the last two decades there has been a surge in activists, linguists, anthropologists, documenters digitally recording endangered language use. These unique records often are uploaded to corporate social media sites or to privately run websites. Despite popular belief, uploading these materials to a server does not mean they are archived and preserved for future generations. In this paper we discuss the differences between professional archiving systems and content management system (CMS) based approaches to making language materials accessible. Looking at the example of the Archive of Languages and Cultures of Ethnic Groups of Thailand we discuss the benefits of a Mukurtu based community website, and how linking it to a professional archive can ensure long-term preservation of precious and unique language materials.

Digital language archives hold vast amounts of materials in endangered or marginalised languages. However, due to limitations in technical infrastructure and the design of these archives, the materials are usually not easily accessible to speakers of the languages represented or their descendants. With the goal to establish best practices for researchers archiving linguistic data, this paper presents a questionnaire designed to assess how archival materials can be made more readily available to language communities.

Linguists are seldom, if ever, engaged in work aimed at communicating risk to the general public. The COVID-19 global pandemic and its associated infodemic may change this state of affairs, at least for documentary linguists. Documenting languages may bring researchers in direct contact with communities speaking minority or marginalized languages and gain key insights into their communicative ecologies. By being both immersed in local networks and more or less knowledgeable about the community’s communicative habits, documentary linguists appear to be placed in a unique position to contribute to communicating risk in ways that are better tailored to the community and, therefore, potentially quite effective locally. Furthermore, adding work in risk communication to their agenda may also stimulate documentary linguists to find new models for “giving back” to the communities they work with. In order to provide a concrete example of how all this may play out in concrete terms, we illustrate the virALLanguages project.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to prepare data that can be used as a base for establishing best practices for making archival linguistic materials available for (re-)use by members of language communities. Design/methodology/approach To assess how archival materials can be made more readily available to marginalized language communities, the authors use a questionnaire targeted at their members and, to a lesser extent, outsider researchers worldwide. Findings The collected data shows certain peculiar – and likely new – tendencies that are vital for finding practical approaches to data access. Importantly, the language communities in question have decent internet access, mainly via mobiles phones and smartphones. They are actively present in social networks and commonly use messengers. Research limitations/implications This study has several biases. It pre-depends on internet access and is based upon a relatively small group of respondents fluent in English, Russian, Spanish or French. Besides these, not all questions were apparently understood as intended. Practical implications To enable better access of marginalized language communities to archived language materials, it seems meaningful to recommend developing mobile-friendly infrastructure, possibly integrated into popular platforms. Originality/value To the best the authors’ knowledge, the question of access to archived linguistic materials by language community members globally, as well as their connectivity and communication habits, was not the subject of previous research with the means of survey data.