A Short Reflection on the Long History of Language Archives

This reflection presents a historical narrative surrounding the term language archives. Three elements are highlighted: (1) the history of the use of the term, (2) the sociological connections between individual voices central to the modern development of language archives, and (3) the evolution of metadata schemas across institutions in newly established language archives. By highlighting these points I contrast a narrative developed within language documentation [51, 73] and the Open Language Archives Community [9, 10]—that language archives are a new innovation. I center a substantial number of obscure digital publications and primary archival resources. This historical view and the links to original source materials are helpful to new information professionals and language scholars.