The Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage has announced a gift of $1.24 million from Ferring Pharmaceuticals for research aimed at preserving and sustaining endangered languages.

The gift will support the center’s new Sustaining Minority Languages in Europe project over the next five years. Building on the work of the Smithsonian's Recovering Voices Program and the center’s cultural-sustainability work, the project will address the need for deeper evaluation of approaches to language revitalization by comparing linguistic and ethnographic data from across several minority language communities to determine factors that drive language revitalization.

"This project is the first large-scale comparative approach to language revitalization across communities in relation to broader social, cultural, political, and economic factors," said Michael Mason, director of the center. "We are incredibly grateful to Ferring for supporting this important work. Their generosity will help communities sustain their languages and traditions for many years to come."