National Tape Archive

National Tape Archive

The National Tape archive came into existance during 1970s at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru, to document and preserve languages, especially the oral traditions and cultures of indigenous and endangered language speakers of the country. The work of documentation or archiving languages in audio tapes was challenging and laborious for both -the investigators and the informants. The research teams collected word lists, sentence lists, various grammatical structures, pronunciations, narrations, monologues, interviews, talks, songs, folk stories, moral stories, speaking, elocution, mono and multi dialogues with the help of local multilingual/polyglot dialect speakers. The audio recordings in some tapes involve two way and multi (Two/Three) repetitions of spoken utterances of each word/sentence.

The institute has a collection of more than 90 Language tape archives that have converted from analogue to digital form. Recently, the metadata has been prepared for these tapes. The metadata includes details about the place of data collection, names of principal investigators, respondents, speakers, and the names of the resource persons with the date.

These audio recordings will benefit linguists, community people, and other scholars for further research work, material preparation, and to know about the language and culture. In this way, using these audio tape archive recordings may be helpful in language revitalization programmes to safeguard Indian national heritage.