Or to present at conference on legacy materials

Legacy Language Materials in the Ernesto Constantino Collection: Features, Challenges, and Opportunities

From the 1960s to the 1990s, members of the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Philippines Diliman (UP Lingg), led by Dr. Ernesto Constantino, conducted extensive fieldwork across the Philippines to collect data from various languages, many of which, like Yogad, Bolinao, and Manide, are now considered threatened or endangered. The materials theycollected form a part of Constantino’s larger personal collection donated by his family to the University Archives. These include boxes of unpublished word lists and translated texts, as well as a total of 458 magnetic reel tapes and 733 cassette tapes, which contain recordings of sentence and word lists, songs, and various narratives in over a hundred Philippine language varieties. The objective of this presentation is to describe the nature of the legacy language materials that were found in the collection in order to identify their possible secondary uses.
Doing so requires the reconstruction of the original objectives that Constantino and his
colleagues held when they embarked on their mission to collect the data, as well as issues and trends that may have influenced their work. From UP Lingg’s recent attempts to repatriate and use some of the data for a new language documentation and description project for the Bugkalot/Egongot language (Barcelo et al, 2025), inherent challenges in using these materials, which include the lack of metadata and encountering sensitive content, will also be discussed, along with the general implications of using legacy language materials in linguistic description and revitalization efforts.