Together with David Nathan I co-edit and manage EL Publishing, an online platform that publishes quality peer-reviewed open access electronic books, and multimedia on documentation and support of endangered languages. We publish on the theory and practice of language documentation, language description, sociolinguistics, language policy, and language revitalisation. All our publications are free to download under a creative commons licence.
- eBooks — we publish multi-chapter electronic books and conference proceedings:
- Peter K. Austin, Harold Koch & Jane Simpson (eds.) 2016. Language, Land and Song: Studies in honour of Luise Hercus
- the 37 chapters of this volume pay tribute to the accomplishments of the late Luise Hercus, who began work on Australian Aboriginal languages in 1962, and present further studies, primarily relating to Indigenous Australia, in the spirit of her inter-disciplinary approach to language documentation.
- Sebastian Drude, Nicholas Ostler & Marielle Moser (eds.) 2018. Endangered languages and the land: Mapping landscapes of multilingualism
- these are the proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, Reykjavik, Iceland.
- four volumes of Proceedings of Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory conferences held at SOAS 2007-2013
- Theresa Biberauer, Erika Herrmann & Sheena Shah. forthcoming. Kroondal German.
- Kroondal German is an undescribed, matrilectal, sixth-generation variety of German spoken by a few hundred people living in a village in North West Province, South Africa. Employing a comparative approach, this eBook describes and analyses some salient phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical properties of Kroondal German, and considers the different factors that have shaped it, including the northern German roots introduced by its missionary founders, the speakers’ extensive exposure to Standard German, and their daily contact with Afrikaans and South African English. The description is informed by extensive data from a range of spoken and written sources, as well as WhatsApp exchanges, and native-speaker acceptability judgements. The eBook includes full-colour maps and illustrations, and a number of linked audio recordings.
- Sheena Shah & Matthias Brenzinger. forthcoming. Writing Click Languages.
- This volume is about click consonants in Southern and Eastern Africa and their representation in writing. It focuses on the various conventions for representing click consonants in the modern orthographies of click-using languages. Beginning with early attempts by travellers, missionaries, and others to capture click sounds in writing, the writing traditions employed in orthographies of click-using languages is reviewed. Click speech sounds are genuine phonemes in less than 30 languages worldwide. Possible hypotheses on their origin and spread among the Indigenous Click languages, the Khoe languages and the click-using Bantu languages are examined. Based on an assessment of exonyms, endonyms, and terms to group and classify these languages and their speakers, the use of certain names is either promoted or discouraged. Considerable variation, often idiosyncratic in nature, exists in the transcription of click phonemes among linguists. This eBook offers a thorough background to the writing of click consonants to those interested, be they language community members, language activists, NGOs, administrators, politicians, or linguists.
- Peter K. Austin, Harold Koch & Jane Simpson (eds.) 2016. Language, Land and Song: Studies in honour of Luise Hercus
- Multimedia — publications which integrates sound, text and image, together with facilitating users’ ability to usefully interact with the content, is the natural form of representation for language documentation. In 2005 we published the first version of Hearing Voices, an innovative multimedia app that was created to complement a public exhibition by sound artist John Wynne. In collaboration with visual artist Denise Hawrysio and linguist Andy Chebanne, John conducted fieldwork with speakers of highly endangered Khoi and San languages in the Kalahari Desert in 2003. The audio includes 10 original song recordings and interviews with 8 speakers of 5 different Khoi/San languages. These are all high quality professional recordings which highlight the extraordinary audio features of these click languages. All are accompanied by English translations. For further information, and to download the app, see the Hearing Voices page.
- Language materials — these are online publications of learning materials, dictionaries, story collections and other online materials to support endangered languages. Dictionaries of Diyari (South Australia), Yinggarda (Western Australia), Malyangapa (New South Wales), and Guwamu (Queensland) are in preparation.
- Bibliographical resources — we publish curated listings and download links of papers that appear in the journal Language Documentation and Description (LDD) and our eBooks. This includes:
- Language Snapshots — an areal listing of short overviews of particular language situations;
- Language Contexts — an areal listing of accounts of the socio-cultural and documentation and revitalisation contexts within which particular languages function;
- Language Documentation Theory and Practice — a critical thematic listing of references on the theory and practice of language documentation, description, and revitalisation.
You can find out more about publishing with us on the EL Publishing website, or contact us via the form here.