The Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) is a digital archive of audio, video, and text of the languages of South Asia and neighboring regions. These source files are most often accompanied by derivatives files such as time-aligned transcriptions and translations, acoustic analyses, word lists, dictionaries, notes on grammatical structure, and analytic aids.  By working alongside Indigenous scholars from South Asia, CoRSAL aims to create data sets and annotated corpora to enhance scholarly work and support community-driven efforts in language maintenance and revitalization.

CoRSAL has the following organizational structure:

  • CoRSAL is a joint project of the University of North Texas and Indiana University, Bloomington (IUB).  
  • The founding director, Shobhana Chelliah, is faculty a IUB where she works with a team of students  and a postdoc to oversee the day-to-day operations of the archive .  
  • CoRSAL is an associate member of the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN).
  • CoRSAL is advised by the following addvisory board members:  Sadaf Munshi, Oksana Zavalina, Mark Phillips, and Ana Roeschley.  These board members are also lead projects centered around digital language archiving and uses the CoRSAL archive as a data sournce.

CoRSAL activities include:

  • Annual symposia (2017-present)
  • An occasional publications series
  • Field experiences in South Asia for US students
  • Training workshops in language documentation and related curriculum development for Indigenous and community language documenters
  • Curriculum development at the intersection of information science and language documentation, including the acquisition, curation, and appraisal of materials, and development and description of collections

CoRSAL activities are funded by:

  • Awards to individual linguists and institutions: per the discipline standard, proposals to the US National Science Foundation and other federal and foundation sources may include budgeting for archiving. When funding is available, depositors pay CoRSAL a fee for archiving. The fee for archiving is waived for those unable to provide funding (true for most depositors from Indigenous communities, independent scholars, or South Asian institutions).
  • CoRSAL Excellence endowment at the University of North Texas
  • Departmental funding from UNT Linguistics and UNT Libraries
  • The Firebird Foundation
  • Funding for CoRSAL research is from NSF, NEH, IMLS.