2026 DELAMAN Award goes to Wesley dos Santos

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The DELAMAN Award committee is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2026 DELAMAN Award is Wesley dos Santos, for his archived collection of documentary materials entitled Kawahiva: documentation of vocabulary, grammar, texts, and verbal arts / Kawahiva: documentação do vocabulário, gramática, textos, e artes verbais, which is archived at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR). 

The Kawahíva collection contains rich documentary materials from three of the eight varieties of Kawahíva—Juma (ISO 639-3 jua), Parintintin (pah), and Jupaú (urz)—which are spoken in northwest Brazil. Through this collection dos Santos demonstrates a commitment to assuring that the material is widely accessible. The collection reflects careful metadata practices, and each item is accompanied by rich metadata in both English and Portuguese. The landing page contains essential information about the group of languages, the speakers, special features of the collection, and orthographic conventions which may be useful for users from many backgrounds. The collection contains a variety of genres including songs, interviews, elicitation, narratives, and conversation, all of which have been collected with high quality audio and video. Annotations are detailed, containing transcriptions of the language, translations into Portuguese, and morpheme glossing.

The content of the collection is grounded in important cultural practices and traditional knowledge and has been created with the community’s needs in mind. In addition to careful transcription and translation of texts, the collection also includes extensive oral annotations in Portuguese. Because a majority of the community does not speak their heritage language, this assures that the collection is accessible to all community members. There are also recordings that offer young community members opportunities to practice verbal arts alongside material culture. 

The award committee was impressed by the high quality of the submissions we received, all of which are exemplary collections of multimedia corpora of endangered languages from around the world. Therefore, DELAMAN wishes to recognize all of the nominees for their scholarship and commitment to digital archiving, thus ensuring that their notable work will be available in perpetuity.

After some deliberation, the committee also selected four honorable mentions, listed here in alphabetical order: