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 25th anniversary of its initial launch. In this presentation, we reflect on AILLA's 25-year legacy of archiving linguistic and cultural resources of Indigenous languages of Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of the United States. We provide a short history of AILLA's founding and a summary of its current holdings; and we show how key institutional collaborations have contributed to AILLA's longevity and success. 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 archiving process and how dedicated title and description fields reserved for Indigenous languages have enriched the metadata in many of the collections. We highlight several early AILLA collections that engendered subsequent collaborative projects and new AILLA collections, many created and conducted by Indigenous researchers about their own languages. Finally, we end with our vision for AILLA's next quarter century.