WELCOME
to the Center for Endangered Languages Documentation (CELD)
There are more than 700 hundred languages spoken in Indonesia, out of which, about 250 speech communities are found in Papua. Many of these languages and cultures presently undergo a rapid reduction. The linguistic competence of their speakers under 20 years of age is primarily passive. Over the next generation, these languages and cultures, i.e. part of the worldwide linguistic and cultural heritage, will disappear.
The Center for Endangered Languages documentation
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works with speech communities in Papua to document their languages and cultures
- trains local linguists, students, and local experts in state of the art documentation technology
- supports teachers, government agencies, artists, activists to develop and use multimedia materials in local languages
- is committed to establish at the State University of Papua (UNIPA) sustainable structures to access ethnolinguistic data from all over the world
The death of a language leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral expressions of the community that spoke it from poems and legends to proverbs and jokes. The loss of languages is also detrimental to humanity's grasp of biodiversity, as they transmit much knowledge about the nature and the universe.
Koichiro Matsuura
(UNESCO Director-General)
