About PILAC
Preserving Indigenous Languages and Cultures.
A nonprofit work, built with native communities.
PILAC is a small nonprofit project — 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 Nigeria. This is the heritage of the daughter who started this project, and her mother and grandmother are co-authors of the work. They tell, she writes, we record. Nothing here is published without their hand on it.
From this first community, the archive will grow — across Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, 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 people whose knowledge it carries, and credited to them.
- Free, always. Heritage learning is offered without paywall, especially for diaspora communities.
- Quiet, not loud. No ads, no engagement tricks, no rush. This is a long work.
- Permission, every time. We add a language only when its community invites us in.
A note from the founder
Nengi Divine Daminabo
I am an international student in the United States, from Nigeria. I love my culture, my people, and the history I am part of — and being far from home, I have had to reach for it 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.