UHM linguistics graduate student volunteers partner with native speakers for the training program-a series of eight two-hour Saturday workshops. During these workshops, participants learn the best practices in documentary linguistics: translation, dictionary making, digital recording, and webpage development. Partners jointly produce a language project that is posted on this website.

The LDTC produces linguistic descriptions and recordings of minority languages that will be of value to the speakers of these languages as well as to scholars, present and future. These documents are accessible to anyone interested in gaining cultural and linguistic knowledge on a wide variety of languages. Our participants' cooperative efforts can be found on this website.

Our strategy is to familiarize native speakers with documentation techniques as well as with endangered language issues. Our mission is to spark interest in the hearts of our participants, in the hope that they will be interested in pursuing in more depth a career in linguistics, or that they will initiate or sustain grass roots documentation efforts in their home communities.