The ELIC project will create an online, searchable spoken corpus for the documentation and study of endangered languages spoken in a linguistically diverse border region. Istria-Kvarner is home to speakers of three Romance languages (Istriot, Istro-Romanian, Istro-Venetian) and four different subgroups of Slavic Čakavian varieties. These Romance and Slavic varieties have developed in contact with one another for hundreds of years. Istriot (ist) and Istro-Romanian (ruo) are severely endangered, both with fewer than 500 L1 users. Čakavian (ckm) is also endangered (EGIDS 6b); while it is considered a mid-sized language, with approximately 50,000 total users in Croatia, the individual local varieties in this region differ substantially from one another and have very small numbers of speakers. Venetian itself is classified as vulnerable, but Istro-Venetian varieties spoken in Istria-Kvarner probably have fewer than 20,000 speakers combined. All of these varieties are threatened by Standard Italian and Standard Croatian, which are both in official use in this region, and they are all in need of additional documentation.

The ELIC Corpus will incorporate 60 hours of audio interview data (15 hours per language), which will be transcribed, annotated, and time-aligned. The corpus data will be used to study language contact in a multilingual environment, language variation, and code-switching practices by speakers, virtually all of whom use two or more varieties regularly in their everyday lives.

This project will also adapt open-source tools and create new resources for language documentation, which will be made freely available so that they can be used in other language documentation projects.

For more information, see the project website: https://elic-corpus.uga.edu

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-2220425. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.