Objectives

To undertake inter departmental and inter disciplinary research related to endangered languages.

To undertake fieldwork, research, analysis, archiving and documentation of smaller indigenous / endangered languages using state-of-art speech and language technologies, in formants that are universally acceptable viz., digitized textual, audio and video formats.

Centre will focus on creating basic NLP tools such as Morphological Analyser, Part-of-Speech (PoS) tagger, Named Entity Recognizer (NER) etc. in endangered languages.

To produce and publish monographs, grammars, grammatical sketches, dictionaries and lexicon, ethno-linguistics and theoretical descriptions, collection of oral and folk literature and scholarly books on endangered languages.

To produce language and dialects atlases with special reference to minority and endangered languages.

To organize workshops and seminars aimed towards promoting advanced research related to endangered languages.

To train teachers and students from other departments / centres in Field Linguistics, Lexicography and in techniques of data management and documentation. Field linguistics would constitute an indispensable part of the Centre.

The centre should serve the indigenous and endangered language communities by making accessible the products of the research of the centre, like, digital and analogue archives of linguistic data, language teaching material and language artifacts.

To promote and foster various domains of endangered languages so as to ensure minority / endangered language communities in maintaining and preserving language vitality, including the development of orthographical resources like scripts, book of letters and primers.

To digitize data collected in the course of the research in the Centre make it available to public by internet.

In the initial phases this Centre shall and may draw resources (such as man power, labs, books, students, etc) from other centres of languages, linguistics, folklore, anthropology and literature in the university but eventually should conceive of forming an independent centre purely devoted to the issues of endangered and indigenous languages.