CALL FOR PAPER : Endangered Languages and Innovative Technologies : Documentation, Processing and Revitalisation

The Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) and INALCO, Paris
invite you to 30th Annual conference of FEL at INALCO Paris, France
3 – 5 November 2026

Theme of the conference
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 ?
  The conference aims to create a space for dialogue between researchers, technologists, and, crucially, language communities themselves, concerning the opportunities and challenges presented by innovative technologies in efforts to prevent language loss and promote the maintenance and revitalisation of endangered languages. We strongly encourage submissions from community members, educators, activists, and practitioners, as well as presentations of collaborative work between academic and non-academic partners.

Important dates :
Submission of abstracts : 10 July
Notification of acceptance : 1 August
Submission of extended abstracts : 15 September
Conference dates : 3-5 November
Excursion : 6 November (optional)

[practicalities follow after description of the theme]

Submission and practical information

Abstracts of 500 - 700 words (not including references) are invited for submission on EasyChair at this address :
https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=felxxx2026 by the deadline of 10 July at 23:59 GMT

Abstracts should be in English and must be submitted as PDF files.
Please note that abstracts in the form of Word documents can not be accepted, and that abstracts cannot be submitted by email.

Abstracts should describe completed or ongoing work. The final proceeding volume will contain original and unpublished works. The abstract should include key words.

They should include the names of the author/s. References should be included if this helps to position the work in relation to work done by others.

You should disclose any use of AI tools in developing your abstract and paper. You shall state at the bottom of your paper the specific software package or AI tool used, the version of that software, and the exact nature of the use. Failure to do so may result in disqualifying your paper.

All abstracts will be reviewed by at least 3 members of the Programme Committee.

Authors whose abstracts are accepted for presentation at the conference will be notified by 1 August and will be required to extend their abstract to a conference paper of 2000-3000 words (not including references) on or before 15 September.

The conference papers will be published in the Conference Book, which will be made available to conference participants and members of the Foundation for Endangered Languages.
Selected papers from the conference will be published after the conference as part of the Endangered Languages Yearbook Series, published by De Gruyter Brill.

Important dates

• Submission deadline : 10 July
• Registration opens : 1 July
• Notification of authors : 1 August
• Submission deadline for conference papers (extended abstracts) : 15 September
• Conference dates : 3 - 5 November
• Excursion (Optional)
  More information
• Contact e-mail address (Abdulhakim.hamidi@inalco.fr)
• Conference web page

ORGANISING INSTITUTIONS
Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL)
FEL Organising Committee
Hakim Elnazarov (Chair)
Eda Derhemi
Steven Krauwer
Salem Mezhoud
Christopher Moseley
Mujahid Torwali

INALCO Organising Committee
Abdul-Hakim HAMIDI (Chair)
Marie Chosson
Johanna Cordova
Hélène de Penanros
Donabedian Demopoulos
Valentina Fedchenko
Marie-Carolin Saglio-Yatzimirsky
Rima Sleiman
Il-Il Yatziv-Malibert