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The Formosan Language Digital Archive is part of the Language Digital Archive developed within the Academia Sinica under the auspices of the National Science Council. The conceptaul design of the Formosan Language Archive has been made under the direction of Elizabeth Zeitoun. The aims of this project are to collect, conserve, edit and disseminate via the world wide web a virtual library of language and linguistic resources permitting access to recorded and transcribed Formosan data collections.

The Formosan languages belong to a widespread language family called "Austronesian", which include all the languages spoken throughout the islands of the Pacific and Indian Ocean (Madagascar, Indonesian, the Philippines, Taiwan, New Guinea, New Zealand, Hawaii and the islands of Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia). A few languages are found in the Malay peninsula and in the Indo-Chinese peninsula (Vietnam and Cambodia).

The Formosan languages exhibit very rich linguistic diversity and the variations that oppose different dialects/languages are enormous. These languages are extremely useful in comparative work but though they have been known to be on the verge of extinction for years, Formosan languages, Formosan linguistics as a specific field has bloomed only very recently, with the participation of more scholars adopting different contemporary linguistic approaches to investigate individual languages or establishing cross-linguistic comparisons. 

Unlike Chinese, the Formosan languages do not have any writing system and the lack of written records dampen our knowledge of extinct languages. Today, while elders are still able to speak their mother tongues fluently, the young cannot, as a result of migration in the cities and the prevalence of Mandarin Chinese in every day life.

We are currently making attempts to record and maintain these languages but we believe that collecting and/or editing existing texts (sentences, textbooks, folktales, narratives) in a digital format constitute the most precious legacy for future generation.

In order to achieve our goal, we hope that more people will devote to the study of the Formosan languages and integrate our project.

Welcome to our.

We expect to accomplish the following tasks during the five years ahead:

1. Text archiving

2. Updating of the four related publication databases

3. Expansion of the existing geographic information system

4. Construction of three other databases

• Technical terms and definitions
• Online grammar
• Topological database (related to GIS)

5. Development of teaching materials

We thanks the following institutions and persons for contributing in various ways during this first year project to the construction of the Formosan language Archive.