The Research Theme Language Documentation and Archiving intents to further develop the expertise in the area of state-of-the-art documentation of small languages and theory-driven, cross-linguistic research based on existing corpora at ZAS. In this context we are developing a strategy for long-term archiving of linguistic corpora on small and often endangered languages in close collaboration with the IDS Mannheim and other corpus initiatives in Germany and internationally. We also work together with the ELAR archive (director: Dr. Mandana Seyfeddinipur). This Research Theme closely collaborate with other Research Themes at ZAS in order to, on the one hand, address also state-of-the-art archiving of other types of linguistic research data; and, on the other hand, to optimize the accessibility of language documentation corpora on small languages for a variety of theoretical research questions.

This research theme is supported by several projects:

1.  the DFG project Acoustic insights into the root-affix asymmetry across languages (AIRAL)
2. the Marie Curie Project Multilingual acquisition and language preservation in Germany: the case of Upper and Lower Sorbian (MAG)
3. the DFG-Heisenberg Grant New empirical linguistics through integration of language documentation, comparative corpus linguistics, typology and language contact research (Empi-Ling)
4. the CRC 'Register' project Speaker's choices in creole contexts: Bislama and Morisien (CRC 1412-Register A02)

Discontinued projects that supported the research theme:

1. the BMBF funded cooperation project Quality - Established: Testing and application of curation criteria and quality standards for audiovisual annotated language data (QUEST)
2. the DFG/ANR project Cross-linguistic phonetics and morphology using a time-aligned multilingual reference corpus built from documentations of 50 languages: Big data on small languages (DoReCo)