ILARA, the Institute for Linguistic Heritage and Diversity, is a centre for training in, expertise on and resources relating to languages that are rarely studied in a university setting. It offers flexible and innovative courses for such languages, which have either been seldom described or taught in past scholarship, or are now in danger of extinction (some are already extinct), or both. The Institute thus builds a bridge between the study of ancient languages (documented only in writing), and of those languages which possess an extant oral tradition (the documentation of these latter thus includes an audio-visual dimension).