EuroBABEL: new endangered languages funding opportunity

[Martin Haspelmath]

As some of you may have seen already, there's a new funding scheme for 
the study of endangered languages. The European Science Foundation (ESF) 
has launched a programme **“*Better Analyses Based on Endangered 
Languages (EuroBABEL)”* (see http://www.esf.org/eurobabel). The first 
deadline is 20 May 2008, i.,e. quite soon.

Compared to the Volkswagen Foundation's DoBeS and the Rausing 
Foundation's ELDP, what is interesting here is that the focus is not on 
documentation, but on analysis:

"*The EuroBABEL programme is crucially different from, and complements, 
existing documentation initiatives in that our emphasis lies on bringing 
the newly gathered data to bear on the development of linguistic theory 
and all areas concerned with the study of language.* The proposal is to 
cover a number of projects that will work on primary data, both newly 
collected and archival material, in order to concentrate on the analysis 
and the use of the results to expand and correct our insights into the 
structure and nature of human language."

Since the ESF's mission is to increase contacts between researchers 
primarily in Europe, research proposals have to be collaborative:
"Proposals must involve a minimum of 3 eligible Principal Investigators 
from 3 different countries participating in the programme (“three nation 
requirement”)." The countries that participate in the programme are many 
European countries (but not, unfortunately, France, Russia, Spain and 
Sweden) as well as the United States of America.

Good luck,
Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616

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