The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), a digital repository at the University of Texas at Austin, is pleased to announced the opening of the Terrence Kaufman Collections.
In 2012, AILLA was awarded the NSF grant BCS-1157867 ''Archiving the Terrence Kaufman Collection'' (Anthony C. Woodbury, PI; Patience Epps and Susan Kung, co-PIs), and the archive staff began the work of organizing, digitizing, ingesting and curating the vast assemblage of American indigenous language materials in the possession of Terrence Kaufman. Kaufman collected and compiled his extremely large collection of materials over the course of his 50-plus-year career as a linguistic anthropologist who not only conducted his own research and fieldwork, but who also directed two large-scale, multi-year, multi-researcher language documentation projects, the Francisco Marroquín Linguistic Project (PLFM) in Guatemala in the 1970s and the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of MesoAmerica (PDLMA) in Mexico in the 1990s and 2000s. As the final result of this NSF grant, AILLA staff have organized this vast assemblage of materials into 12 separate collections in the digital repository. The 12 collections include data on 119 distinct languages, as well as approximately 70 dialectal varieties. These languages and varieties represent 26 languages families, 4 isolates, and 1 pidgin, and they come from 22 countries extending from Canada to Argentina. Language families with the highest representation of materials are Mayan (Mexico and Guatemala), Mixe-Zoquean (Mexico), Otomanguean (Mexico), and Uto-Aztecan (Mexico and USA). Please see the official announcement on AILLA for descriptions of and direct links to the 12 collections: https://www.ailla.utexas.org/node/174.
These 12 collections represent a treasure-trove of data that can be utilized for countless purposes. If you use any of these materials in your own researcher or for other non-commercial purposes, please follow and respect AILLA's Conditions of Use (https://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/rights/use_conditions), including citing the materials and the archive. For guidance on how to cite these materials, please see AILLA's Citation Guidelines (https://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/rights/citation). Finally, make sure to get permission from the copyright owner if you want to create any kind of derivative product. Nothing in AILLA may be used for commercial purposes. We hope that you are able to enjoy and make use of these materials. If you do, please write to us at ailla@ailla.utexas.org and let us know!