About PILAC
Preserving Indigenous Languages and Cultures.
A growing project, built with native communities.
PILAC is a growing project, on its way to becoming a nonprofit — a focused archive of endangered and underdocumented indigenous languages and cultures. We document each community in partnership with its own native speakers and culture bearers, and we offer everything we gather freely to the diaspora and the curious.
We begin with the Kalabari of the Niger Delta, in Rivers State, Nigeria. This is the heritage of the daughter who started this project, and her mother, grandmother, aunties, and other family are collaborators on the work.
From this first community, the archive will grow — across Africa and beyond — every language entered on its community's terms, with its own people at the front of the page.
If you belong to an indigenous community whose language you would like to see preserved here, or if you can lend your voice, your knowledge, or a correction to a community already in the archive — please write to us. This is a living work.
Our principles
- Communities First — Cultural content is written with the communities it represents in mind, and credited to those who share their knowledge. Indigenous speakers are essential, especially for underdocumented languages.
- Free, Always — Heritage learning is offered without paywall, especially for diaspora communities.
- Adequate Research and Representation — Every entry is built on careful research and conversation with members of each community, online and in person. Accurate representation and credited sources, before scale.
A note from the founder
Nengi Divine Daminabo
I am an Ijaw woman who wants to preserve her culture — and, in the same breath, help preserve other indigenous cultures. I am an international student in the United States, from Nigeria, and being far from home, I have had to reach for my heritage more deliberately than I ever expected to.
I have come to believe that the people who love a culture are the ones who keep it alive. I find beauty in where I am from. I trust that others find beauty in theirs. There are people who want to know more about who they are and where they come from, and simply do not have the resources. PILAC is for them. This archive belongs to everyone.
I am not a linguist by training. I am a graduate student in media, drawn to narratives, cognition, and the learning sciences — and a granddaughter of the diaspora who refused to let her grandmother's tongue pass without a record. PILAC sits at the meeting of those things: the stories, the people who carry them, and the science of how new generations come to hold them.
The people who keep these languages are still with us. That is reason enough to begin — and reason enough to invite you in. PILAC is a passion project, built slowly with native communities and offered freely. If you would like to help shape it — for your own people, or to learn about someone else's — please write.