AILLA: The first 25 years

Presented by Susan Kung, Patience Epps and Anthony C. Woodbury at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 09 September, 2026. #LDA2026 In March 2026, the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) celebrated the 25thanniversary of its initial launch. In this presentation, we reflect on AILLA's 25-year legacy of archivinglinguistic and cultural resources of Indigenous languages of Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts ofthe United States. We provide a short history of AILLA's founding and a summary of its currentholdings; and we show how key institutional collaborations have contributed to AILLA's longevity andsuccess. We share specific examples of how AILLA's multilingual graphical user interfaces in English,Spanish, and Portuguese have facilitated community participation and engagement in the archivingprocess and how dedicated title and description fields reserved for Indigenous languages have enrichedthe metadata in many of the collections. We highlight several early AILLA collections that engenderedsubsequent collaborative projects and new AILLA collections, many created and conducted byIndigenous researchers about their own languages. Finally, we end with our vision for AILLA's nextquarter century.