The 30th Annual Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, FEL XXX (2026)

Organised by the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Inalco)

Paris, France, 3-5 November 2026

Endangered Languages and Innovative Technologies: Documentation, Processing and Revitalisation

As more and more languages in the world face the threat of extinction, driven by increasing language shift and the growing power of economically or politically dominant and prestige languages, speech communities and scholars alike are trying to reverse the trend to prevent language death. In the course of their endeavours, they are looking at new technologies and various applications and their potential to enhance documentation and support the revitalisation of endangered languages.

As documentation is no longer the only option, since it is designed only to take a picture of the state of a language at a given time, other, potentially more effective options and approaches, such as prevention, maintenance and promotion of endangered languages are gaining prominence. Ultimately, revitalisation, the endgame for endangered languages, needs new and more powerful tools and technologies to succeed. Digital technologies can provide valuable tools for teaching, recording, and sharing languages, as well as creating metadata that can be used creatively in research and educational contexts.

Today many innovative technologies and digital systems are largely built, and function on data from a small number of dominant, well-documented languages. As a result, many communities, especially those whose languages are endangered, primarily oral, or under-documented, remain excluded from the so-called digital sphere. This exclusion does not constitute merely a privation, or absence of access to technological tools, systems or infrastructure, but emerges because of the dominance of titular languages over less endowed language communities. Such dominance has direct consequences for linguistic and cultural transmission, access to new technologies, as well as linguistic rights.

Many communities around the world are rising to the challenge and are actively working to reclaim, sustain, and revitalize their languages. In the process attempts are sometimes made to make use of digital tools and technologies, which have the potential to support documentation, learning and transmission. However, such tools frequently fail to serve the needs of endangered language communities effectively and may instead impose assumptions and models derived from dominant languages.

Although digital technologies can be powerful instruments for countering language endangerment, they can be more effective if they are developed in collaboration with the linguistic communities, and in full respect for their knowledge, priorities, and data sovereignty.

This conference, the thirtieth organised by the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL), organised in collaboration with INALCO, places communities at the centre of the discussion. It explores how innovative technologies can support language documentation and strengthen revitalisation, and, conversely, how community knowledge and linguistic diversity can reshape the design, evaluation, and purpose of digital systems themselves, and thus contribute to a more sustainable and effective response to language endangerment.

A key challenge for maintenance and revitalisation remains the persistent documentation bottleneck. Large collections of recordings exist for many endangered languages, yet only a small portion has been transcribed, annotated, or made accessible to communities for revitalization purposes. This reflects not a lack of effort, but structural realities and challenges: documentation is time-intensive, requires close collaboration with speakers, and often takes place in contexts where literacy practices differ or where knowledge is culturally sensitive. At the same time, current technological tools and approaches rely heavily on large, standardised datasets, which are rarely available for endangered languages. New technology has the potential to solve issues of transcription and annotation, data collection and analysis, as well as of promotion and dissemination of cultural and linguistic patterns and practices, provided they are made accessible to communities and community institutions, through training and collaborative partnerships.

In this context, endangered languages should not simply be viewed as “low-resource” problems to be solved. They can become sites of innovation that challenge dominant assumptions underlying technological development and encourage the exploration of more flexible, interpretable, and culturally grounded technologies. By foregrounding community perspectives and lived experiences, the conference aims to explore how innovative technologies can support and sustain language revitalisation and how community initiatives, experiences, and achievements can offer new perspectives and approaches to new technologies, such as AI, and transform them into more meaningful tools for the promotion and revitalisation of endangered languages.

The conference therefore aims to bridge three interdependent dimensions of technologies, documentation, and revitalisation, both in practice and in the development of future tools and approaches.

We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following questions exploring the application of innovative technologies in documentation efforts and ongoing community-led revitalization initiatives:

• How can innovative technologies improve transcription, annotation, and corpus- building in the documentation of endangered languages (EL)? 
• How can ethical data practices and data sovereignty be ensured when applying new technological tools to EL?  
• How can archiving practices be aligned with community needs and values and what role can AI systems play in the process? 
• How to acquire, appropriate and utilise new language technologies for the transmission of EL.
• How to plan and co-design language technologies with speaker communities. 
• How to define and design community training, capacity building, and knowledge transfer with digital tools for the purpose of enabling community-driven revitalisation projects. 
• What success stories and case studies can be identified in the application of new technologies to the process of revitalisation of EL? 
• What are the risks, limitations, and unintended consequences of existing or emerging technological tools in language revitalisation?