The geographical region of insular South East Asia and New Guinea is well-known as an area of mega-biodiversity. Less well-known is the extreme linguistic diversity in this area: over a quarter of the world’s 6000 languages are spoken here. As small minority languages, most of these will cease to be spoken in the coming few generations. The LAISEANG corpus ensures the preservation of unique records of languages and the cultures encapsulated by them in the region. The language resources have been gathered by twenty linguists at, or in collaboration with Dutch universities over the last 40 years, and are compiled and archived in collaboration with The Language Archive (TLA) in Nijmegen