The Heritage Lottery Fund is able to support applications for projects with a language heritage dimension where there is a clear heritage content and links to a particular cultural tradition or place. This includes languages at risk of extinction. All normal HLF criteria apply to language heritage projects.

Language heritage is defined as:

• the history of a language, or dialect, and its oral, recorded and literary traditions;
• the experiences, memory, culture and traditions of its speech community.

Language heritage includes the historic, cultural, social and geographical uses and the content of a language or dialect.

Languages include:

• languages indigenous to the UK and their dialects;
• languages and dialects of communities resident in the UK.

We can fund Language heritage projects if they:

• conform to the above definition of language heritage
• satisfy all normal HLF criteria.

We are not able to fund projects if they:

• are language teaching projects with no heritage component
• are language development projects that are concerned with the contemporary use of a language or dialect, for example promoting the status of a particular language.

**DOWNLOAD THE LANGUAGE HERITAGE GUIDANCE NOTES (pdf file 116 KB)**