LACITO is a primarily Francophone

Francophone

The adjective francophone means French-speaking, typically as primary language, whether referring to individuals, groups, or places. Often, the word is used as a noun to describe a natively French-speaking person....

 multidisciplinary research organisation, created in 1976. It is a branch of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Centre national de la recherche scientifique

The National Center of Scientific Research is the largest governmental research organization in France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe....

, the principal network of researchers in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

.

Aims

The LACITO is an interdisciplinary research team, principally devoted to the study of culture

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

s and language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s of oral tradition

Oral tradition

Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...

.
The research of its members typically involves linguistic and/or anthropological fieldwork in various areas and language families: Oceanic, Tibeto-Burman, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian

Dravidian languages

The Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages, spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and...

, Balkanic area, Bantu

Bantu languages

The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...

, among others.

An important part of LACITO's work is the Projet Archivage for the preservation of valuable audio archives in the world's endangered languages.