The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America: An Overview

Abstract

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a repository of primarily linguistic and anthropological data about the indigenous languages of Latin America and the Caribbean. In this article we give a brief description of the archive and its mission in Section 1, and we discuss the predecessors and precursors to AILLA in Section 2, and the importance of AILLA in Section 3. In Section 4 we highlight a few of the large and publicly accessible collections, and in Section 5 we illustrate some of the ways in which teachers, professors, researchers, and indigenous community members have used data archived at AILLA.

Prospects for indigenous language bilingualism in Mexico

“…This literature is the patrimony of the Nahuatl-speaking people and the patrimony of humanity (the view of the project, which we also recognize is not universally accepted). With this idea in mind, authors and volunteers might discuss possible future submission to the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (Kung & Sherzer, 2013). In line with this idea, and as described by toward knowledge of Nahuatl and bilingualism.…”

Organization of Knowledge and Information in Digital Archives of Language Materials

“…Language ISO 639-2 32 , ISO 639-3 33 , Glottocode 34 , AustLang 35 Genre OLAC Discourse Type Vocabulary 36 , OLAC Linguistic Data Type Vocabulary 37 Type Internet Media Types 38 , DCMItype 39 Subject Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) 40 Names VIAF 41 , LC Name Authority File 42 , OLAC Role Vocabulary 43 , MARC Relator 44 Date W3CDTF 45 , EDTF 46 Place Names ISO 3166 47 , Thesaurus of Geographic Names 48 Other Traditional Knowledge Labels 49 Beyond language names, Genre and Type are the metadata fields with data values most commonly drawn from controlled vocabularies (see Table 1). The OLAC metadata scheme prescribes the use of the OLAC Linguistic Type controlled vocabulary to represent the genre in an instance of the Type element.…”

“…We have to find that metadata and track it ourselves" (arch_4). Alternatively, in cases where the original collector is deceased, archival staff must create metadata to the best of their ability using only the materials themselves, which may have little to no English content (e.g., Thieberger, 2014;Kung & Perez Baez, 2015;Kung, 2017).…”

Toward Representational Sovereignty: Rewards and Challenges of Indigenous Media in the A’uwẽ-Xavante Communities of Eténhiritipa-Pimentel Barbosa

“…Ethnomusicologists, and more recently linguistic anthropologists, have thought a great deal about the problems of storage, retrieval and accessibility of different formats-from wax cylinders and reel-to-reel tape recorders to digital formats-and the generally ephemeral nature of ethnographic recordings (see for example, Kung & Sherzer, 2013;Mengel & Sánchez-Gomez, 2010;Seeger 1986Seeger , 1991Seeger , 1996. Several archives have been established to preserve primarily audio but also audio-visual documentary recordings made by scholars.…”