On Monday, October 9, 2017, the City of Austin celebrated its first official Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The auspicious occasion also marked the launch of the newly migrated and updated Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), a digital language archive of recordings, texts, and other multimedia materials in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. AILLA’s mission is to preserve these materials and make them available to Indigenous peoples, researchers, and other friends of these languages, now and for generations to come.
AILLA was founded in 2000, by Joel Sherzer (UT Anthropology), Anthony C. Woodbury (UT Linguistics), and Mark McFarland (UT Libraries). The pilot site was launched in 2000, and the first public site was launched in 2001. The new site has been updated with additional user functionality, including the ability to perform a keyword search across all collections, as well as the ability to stream and view some media files without having to download them first.
Later this month, AILLA will launch its new Self-Deposit Tool, which will introduce a crowdsourcing feature to the repository. Researchers will be able to upload materials in and about indigenous languages of Latin America directly to the repository and make them available via the website.
Access to AILLA and its resources is always free of charge. Most of the resources in the collection are available to the public, but some have special access restrictions. To access the site, please read the information below. Questions about AILLA should be directed to Susan Kung, AILLA manager.
