Language Projects


Indigenous Languages of Australia


50 Words Project

Showcases words from 64 languages across Australia, with further languages being added regularly as more communities around Australia become involved. For each language, you can hear the words spoken via a map that shows the general location of the language.


AustLang

Provides a controlled vocabulary of persistent identifiers, a thesaurus of languages and peoples, and information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages which has been assembled from referenced sources.


Australian Indigenous Language Collections

A guide to materials held in the National Library of Australia, with links to similar resources at State Libraries.


Contemporary and Historical Reconstruction in the Indigenous Languages of Australia (CHIRILA)

A lexical database (a database with words from different languages). Currently, there are about 780,000 words, from all over Australia, of which about 20% is publicly available.


Digital Daisy Bates

A collection of over 23,000 pages of wordlists of Australian languages, originally recorded by Daisy Bates in the early 1900s, made up of the original questionnaires and around 4,000 pages of typescripts.


First Languages Australia

First Languages Australia is a partner institution of LDaCA and encourages communication between communities, the government and key partners whose work can impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.


Gambay

A map of Australia’s first languages.


Indigenous Voices of Queensland

An online resource created to improve public access to audio recordings, held in the Fryer Library (UQ), of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people speaking Indigenous languages of Queensland. The project aims to make the recordings as openly available as possible so they can be used to assist communities with language recovery and education, and deepen knowledge of First Nations languages. A map summary and table of languages is also available for browsing, based on recordings from three academics: Elwyn Flint, Bruce Rigsby and Bruce Sommer.


Interactive Queenslander Languages Map

An interactive map providing resources for Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, hosted by the State Library of Queensland and searchable by suburb or language.


Language Centres

The Indigenous Languages and Arts (ILA) program currently supports a number of organisations, including a network of 20 language centres. A list of these centres is available from the above link in PDF or DOCX format.


Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages (LAAL)

See Language Archives.


Living Languages

Provides grassroots training to people, communities and Language Centres in Australia doing language work on the ground in remote, regional and urban areas.


Nyingarn

A platform for primary sources in Australian Indigenous languages.


Languages of the World


Ethnologue

Provides information about the languages of the world, but operates on a subscription model. The information that is available without a subscription is very limited: the first three lines of individual language entries which include the ISO 639-3 code, the classification of the language into a language family, and a link to the language’s OLAC page.


Glottolog

Comprehensive reference information for the world’s languages, especially the lesser-known languages. LDaCA uses Glottolog language codes in our metadata.


Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)

An international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by:

(i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and

(ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources.

OLAC harvests metadata and their website has a search facility to find resources for languages. OLAC metadata recommendations are the basis for some of LDaCA’s metadata.


World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online (WALS)

A large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors.