Language Documentation Summer School in Berlin

31 August 2026

From 31 August to 4 September 2026, Tshering Om Tamang participated in the 2026 Summer School “Language Science Meets Linguistic Diversity” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. The week-long summer school was jointly organised by the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS).

Tshering attended three courses: Digital Tools for Annotation and Analysis of Language Documentation Data (ELAN, FLEx), Data Management and Metadata Creation for Archiving in Language Documentation, and Capturing Language Use. The courses combined theoretical sessions with intensive practical work, covering the use of ELAN and FLEx for transcription, annotation, and corpus development; approaches to organising, managing, documenting, and archiving language documentation materials; and hands-on work with audio and video recording equipment for capturing language use. The recording sessions also included reviewing recordings and considering how different equipment and recording approaches affect the quality of the data collected.

The training is particularly relevant to Tshering’s upcoming fieldwork in Bhutan, where she will travel to Cungseng and Riti to collect linguistic data for the documentation and grammatical analysis of Monkha. The skills gained in the summer school will support the recording of audio and video data in the field and the subsequent processing, annotation, organisation, and archiving of the materials.

The summer school also provided Tshering with an opportunity to meet researchers working on language documentation and linguistic diversity across a range of linguistic contexts, and to exchange practical approaches to documenting, analysing, and preserving endangered and under-resourced languages.