ICLDC 7 will offer workshops and talk story sessions. Each virtual session will occur more than once and at varying times to the extent possible, allowing multiple opportunities for interested attendees to participate.
Workshops
Each 90-minute workshop will be offered twice. These sessions will be held synchronously over Zoom. As opposed to Talk Story Sessions, workshops will accommodate a larger number of participants and are intended to be more presentational and instructional in style. They will be led by an expert/experienced instructor.
Talk Story Sessions
Introduced at ICLDC 2017 in response to participant feedback and implemented again in ICLDC 2019, ICLDC 7 will again have “Talk Story” sessions. These sessions will be held synchronously over Zoom, and will be led by an expert/experienced discussant. Each Talk Story will be repeated on three days of the conference at varying times (whenever possible), allowing ample opportunity for conference attendees to participate in the Talk Story sessions of their choice. Talk Story sessions are meant to be fully interactive for participants, rather than a one-directional presentation of information. Because of this, participation will be limited to 30 people.
Workshops
(each offered twice)
Workshop 1: The Spirit of the Language
Lana Whiskeyjack & Kyle Napier
Indigenous language speakers and learners understand the importance of the ‘spirit of the language’ in language revitalization, reclamation, and acquisition. Workshop participants will discuss the spirit of their language, causes of disconnect from the spirit of the language, and community-proposed ways to reconnect to the spirit of the language.
Dr. Lana Whiskeyjack Lana is a treaty iskwew from Saddle Lake Cree Nation and has been an assistant professor with the University of Alberta since 2017. In 2017, Lana completed her iyiniw pimâtisiwin kiskeyihtamowin doctoral program at University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quill, a former Indian Residential School attended by two generations of her own family. Lana is the lead researcher with the Spirit of the Language project.
Kyle is a Dene/nêhiyaw Métis from Northwest Territory Métis Nation who has dedicated himself to Indigenous language reclamation with the languages of his lineage. He has worked with his nation for four years, and is now completing his master’s thesis with community members from his home region to address Dëné Dédlıné Yatı̨́ revitalization. Kyle is a graduate research assistant with the Spirit of the Language project.
Workshop 2: Revitalization at a distance: Engaging digital archives for language reclamation
Claire Bowern, Susan Hanson, George Hayden, & Denise Smith-Ali
This workshop describes how to run a grammar “boot camp”, for intensive sketch grammar writing and academic linguists working with communities at a distance. We cover the rationale, general setup, and sample workflows. This facilitates long distance collaborations and use of archival materials.
Claire Bowern is professor of linguistics; she has been working on language documentation and collaborating with Australian language communities and individuals for 20 years. She has run 5 boot camps over 6 years and has written articles on grammar writing, language documentation, and ethics.
Sue Hanson is coordinator of the Goldfields Language Centre and previously ran the Wangka Maya Language Centre. She has approximately 30 years experience working with all aspects of language documentation and support for communities.
Workshop 3: Relating the past, present & future: archiving language collections
Raina Heaton, Zachary O’Hagan, Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Susan Smythe Kung, Nick Thieberger, & Paul Trilsbeek
Archivists from a number of language archives will discuss the basics of archiving language documentation materials. Participants will learn about preparing their files for archiving and about creating good quality metadata descriptions. The workshop will end with a Q&A session for which participants are encouraged to submit questions in advance.
Raina Heaton is the curator of the Native American Languages Collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. As a linguist she works on language documentation and revitalization projects for Tunica (Isolate, Louisiana), Kaqchikel (Mayan, Guatemala), and Enenlhet (Enlhet-Enenlhet, Paraguay), and participates in collaborative language-related projects across Oklahoma.
Susan Smythe Kung is the manager of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) and a documentary linguist. She is internationally engaged in the formulation of best practices for organizing collections of language documentation data for deposit into endangered language archives and for citing archived language data. The data and analyses from her own language documentation work on Huehuetla Tepehua, an indigenous language of Mexico, are archived at AILLA.
Zachary O’Hagan is a postdoctoral research fellow in the California Language Archive (CLA) at UC Berkeley. As a documentary linguist he specializes in the Indigenous languages and history of Amazonia, especially Peru, where he has done fieldwork with speakers of Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní), Omurano (isolate), Taushiro (isolate), and, most extensively, Caquinte (Arawak). Archival materials from these projects are deposited with the CLA and the Endangered Languages Archive.
Nick Thieberger is director of PARADISEC. He works with speakers of Nafsan (Vanuatu) and is now finalising a Nafsan dictionary. He is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and is editor of the Language Documentation & Conservation Journal.
Mandana Seyfeddinipur
Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a linguist and the director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and heads the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS. Her expertise includes theory and method of modern language documentation, language use and face to face interaction, multimodality of language in interaction and cognitive basis of language production.
Paul Trilsbeek is the head of The Language Archive at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, which includes the DOBES documentation of endangered languages archive. As a member of the CoreTrustSeal Standards and Certification Board, he is also involved in defining criteria for trustworthy data repositories.
Workshop 4: Semi-automated transcription for Language Documentation with Elpis
Ben Foley, Nicholas Lambourne, Daan van Esch, & Nay San
Transcription is a bottleneck in language documentation and is often done by linguists, rarely by community members. This workshop shows how to use Elpis, a user-friendly tool that provides a “best-guess” transcription to edit. Using Elpis can make it easier for community members to transcribe their recordings.
Ben Foley is project manager of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) Transcription Acceleration Project (TAP). TAP brings cutting-edge language technology within reach of people working with some of the worlds oldest languages. Ben’s previous experience with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language resource development has resulted in apps and websites galore, including Iltyem-Iltyem and the Gambay First Languages Map.
Nicholas Lambourne is a research assistant attached to the Transcription Acceleration Project, based at the University of Queensland. His work focuses on making automatic speech recognition toolkits more accessible to those without technical backgrounds. He is one of the core developers of Elpis.
Daan van Esch is a technical program manager with Google in Mountain View, California. His research interests include speech processing, natural-language processing, and developing scalable ways to bring language technology to as many languages as possible. He is also interested in how machine learning can help accelerate language documentation work.
Nay San is a PhD student in linguistics at Stanford University and is interested in leveraging computational methods for the documentation and linguistic analysis of endangered languages, particularly of those in Australia. Before Stanford, he worked on describing vowel variation in Kaytetye and automating data processing tasks for producing a dictionary of Warlpiri.
Workshop 5: Realizing relationships through the collection of spatial data in a documentary project
Jeff Good & Clayton Hamre
This workshop will consider how documentary work can be augmented to include the collection of spatial information about a community so that the relationship between its languages and geographic location can be better understood. It will focus, in particular, on how to achieve this using widely available tools and datasets.
Jeff Good is Professor of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo. His research interests include comparative Niger-Congo linguistics, morphosyntactic typology, and the documentation of endangered languages. He is currently co-directing a project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation to document the languages and multilingual ecology of the Lower Fungom region of Cameroon that involves close collaboration with faculty and students at three Cameroonian universities. He serves as co-editor of Language Dynamics and Change and Linguistics Vanguard and regularly teaches on topics related to language documentation.
Clayton Hamre is a PhD student in linguistics at the University at Buffalo, and a graduate of Ohio University with a bachelor’s in geographic information science. He is interested in historical linguistics and linguistic geography, and is currently pursuing research in the historical phonology of Otomí (Oto-Manguean) and in cross-linguistic patterns in the spatial structure of dialects.
Workshop 6: Regenerating Hawaiian Speakers: Recognizing Relationships and Challenges
Larry Kimura & Bruce Torres Fischer
The common goal, E ola ka ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi – May the Hawaiian language live,of a unified intra-group relationship is pivotal for the regeneration of Hawaiian language speakers affecting inter-generational stakeholders who commit to a lifetime of inter-group relationships consisting of familial, institutional, and governmental networks coming together as a vehicle for Hawaiian wellbeing.
Larry L Kimura, PhD, is Associate Professor of Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. Co-Founder of ʻAha Pūnana Leo, Hawaiian Cultural Planner ʻImiloa Astronomy Center, Chairperson Hawaiian Lexion New Hawaiian Words Committee, Co PI Kaniʻāina Spoken Hawaiian Digital Repository.
Bruce Torres Fischer, B.A., is an incoming graduate student at Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. Assistant for the Kaniʻāina Spoken Hawaiian Digital Repository.
Workshop 7: How to Build-Your-Own Practical A.I. Tools for Language Maintenance
Michael Running Wolf, Noelani Arista, Caroline Running Wolf, Caleb Moses, & Joel Davison
AI offers useful tools even for low-resourced languages. Using the example of Hua Ki’i, our Hawaiian language image recognition app, we will walk you through the steps to build your own app using open-source AI tools. Participants need an active Google and GitHub account, no machine learning experience required.
Michael Running Wolf (Northern Cheyenne) has a Master’s of Science in Computer Science and is a software development engineer working on AI data pipelines. In his spare time Michael pursues indigenous language and culture reclamation using immersive technologies (AR/VR/XR), artificial intelligence, and building an automatic speech recognition system for an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest.
Caleb Moses
Caleb Moses (Aotearoa Māori) is a Data Scientist hailing from the Hokianga region in the far north of New Zealand. He has a Postgraduate Diploma in Pure Mathematics from the University of Auckland. His work focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, and automation. Moses is currently working with Te Reo Irirangi o te Hiku o te Ika on Papa Reo, a digital Aotearoa Māori language platform for a bilingual New Zealand.
Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) is an Associate Professor of Hawaiian and U.S. History at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. Her areas of interest include Hawaiian religious, legal and intellectual history, Hawaiian historical methods and translation. Her current project furthers the persistence of Hawaiian language archives through digital mediums. She was a contributing author to “Making Kin with Machines” an essay on Indigenous views on Artificial Intelligence, one of ten award winning essays in the MIT competition, Resisting Reduction. Her book the Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawaiʻi and the Early United States won NAISAʻs Best First Book Award for 2019.
Caroline Running Wolf (Crow), née Old Coyote, is a multilingual Cultural Acclimation Artist dedicated to supporting Indigenous language and culture vitality. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research explores potential applications of immersive technologies (AR/VR/XR) and artificial intelligence to effectively enhance Indigenous language and culture reclamation.
Joel Davison
Joel Davison is a Gadigal and Dunghutti man from Sydney Australia. Living culture through an active role in language revitalisation for the Gadigal language, he is also an avid technologist and works at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia as a Robotics Analyst.
Workshop 8: How to document small-scale multilingualism? Theory and practice of an emerging approach to language documentation
Pierpaolo Di Carlo & Rachel Ayuk Ojong Diba
Competence in multiple languages spoken in neighboring communities is a widespread feature among speakers of endangered languages. Small-scale multilingual practices can be revealing of relationships that a monolingual approach to language documentation would obscure. This workshop will provide both theoretical grounding and practical suggestions for the documentation of such practices.
Pierpaolo Di Carlo (PhD Linguistics 2009, Florence) is postdoctoral associate at the Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo – SUNY. His areas of interest include the study of traditional forms of multilingualism in rural Africa, language ideologies, language documentation, African anthropology, and the languages and societies of the Hindu-Kush area (Pakistan – Afghanistan). Pierpaolo has done extensive fieldwork in Pakistan and Cameroon, has published in journals like “Language” and the “International Journal of the Sociology of Language”, and currently coordinates both a research project called KPAAM-CAM (PI Jeff Good) and the virALLanguages initiative.
Rachel Ayuk Ojong Diba is Assistant Lecturer at the University of Buea, Cameroon. In her doctoral dissertation (Applied Linguistics 2019, Buea), she dealt with the small-scale, traditional forms of multilingualism found in Lower Fungom—an area of high linguistic diversity and language endangerment in NW Cameroon—based on first-hand data she collected during extensive fieldwork in the region. She has co-authored articles published in, e.g., “the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistic studies”, and has presented her work in international venues in Europe. Her areas of interest include Multilingualism (rural and urban), Pidgin and Creole studies, and Language Documentation.
Talk Story Sessions
(each offered three times; audience limited to 30 people to help facilitate discussion)
Talk Story 1: Collaboration, communities, and relationship-building: Pushing the conversation forward
Badiba Olivier Agodio, Kayla Begay, Tinah Dobola, Octavio León Vázquez, Kate Lindsey, Iara Mantenuto, Jerry William Rain, Katerina Rain, Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada, Hannah Sande, & Cheryl Tuttle
In this Talk Story, five international teams of community members and linguists will encourage discussion around collaboration and relationship-building in documentation and revitalization. Attendees will consider how relationship-building informs the types of data collected and outputs produced, how to teach collaboration, and how to center community voices.
Agodio Badiba Olivier is a native speaker of the Guébie language. He has been working with Hannah Sande on the Guébie language documentation project since 2014, hosting visiting linguists in his home, providing narratives, translating texts, and participating in elicitation tasks. He also acts as a liaison between outside linguists and the Guébie community. He does this work out of love for his community and language.
Kate Lindsey is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Boston University, specializing in language documentation and description, specifically of the languages in southern Papua New Guinea. She has experience working with communities in many countries (United States, Russia, Estonia, Papua New Guinea) and on projects with different types of outputs, including documentation materials, revitalization efforts, variationist analysis, and doctoral research. She has worked closely with Tina Dobolah on developing best practices for publication that involves community collaboration.
Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Languages Sustainability and Linguistics at the University of Alberta and specializes in language documentation and revitalization and historical linguistics. He has worked collaboratively with multiple language communities in South and North America and, building on these experiences, he has explored best practices in documentation and revitalization and ways in which we can teach collaboration and ethics inside and outside the classroom.
Kayla Begay is a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and board member with the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. She is an Assistant Professor at Humboldt State University in Native American Studies. She received her PhD in Linguistics from UC Berkeley, focusing on description of California Dene languages. She will be sharing her experiences with community-based language work with the Dene Languages Working Group in collaborative analysis of archival materials.
Iara Mantenuto is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at California State University Dominguez Hills. For the past three years she has worked on San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec and more recently on Yucuquimi de Ocampo Mixtec. She collaborates with community linguists and other community members in studying, documenting, and revitalizing their languages. The main focus of these collaborations has been to involve the youth in projects on Mixtec, motivating them to become the driving force behind future projects. Her research focuses on morphology, syntax and enhancement of pedagogical techniques.
Hannah Sande is an Assistant Professor of linguistics at Georgetown University specializing in phonology, morphology, and language documentation and description. She has worked with members of various African language communities including Guébie (Kru), Ebrié and Gã (Kwa), Dafing (Mande), Moro (Kordofanian), Nobiin (Nilotic), and Amharic (Ethio-Semitic). She has been working closely with Agodio Badiba Olivier and the Guébie community in Gnagbodgounoa, Côte d’Ivoire since 2013. Current projects of the Guébie documentation team include community-driven orthography development and writing a grammar of the language.
Tinah Dobola
Tinah Dobola has worked with Kate Lindsey and the Ende Language Project since 2015. In this time, she has contributed to documentation efforts, such as the telling and translation of traditional Ende stories, and preservation efforts, such as the creation of Ende-medium storybooks for the elementary school. She also facilitated multilingual community discussions regarding collaboration between the Ende community and visiting linguistic researchers.
Jerry William Rain is a Stoney-Nakota Sioux speaker from the Paul First Nation of Treaty Six in Alberta, Canada. Mr. Rain has a B.Ed. degree from the University of Alberta and has taught in both elementary and high school settings in his native community for over 25 years. Currently, he is involved in a language revitalization program to promote the re-learning and reusing of his native Stoney-Nakota language. Through joint efforts with the Linguistics Department at the University of Alberta, Mr. Rain has been recording his native language in textual and audio form for future generations.
Cheryl Tuttle is a member of the Yurok Tribe of Yurok and Karuk ancestry. A graduate from Indian Teacher Education and Personnel Program at Humboldt State University, she has worked professionally in education since 1985. Currently a principal at Round Valley Elementary/Middle School in Covelo, California, she has been a teacher for 31 years. The Director of Native Studies for the Round Valley Unified School District, she has implemented and taught Wailaki since 2014 along with Rolinda Want (Wailaki), with help from linguists Justin Spence (UC Davis) and Kayla Begay (Humboldt State).
Octavio León Vázquez is a Linguistics PhD student at Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS). He holds an M.A. in Indo-American Linguistics from CIESAS, he is a former researcher/lecturer at Universidad Intercultural del Estado de México, and he is a native speaker of Yucuquimi de Ocampo Mixtec. He has worked on Otomanguean languages, particularly Mixtec languages, on topics such as identity, revitalization, and documentation. His research focuses on phonetics, phonology and linguistic anthropology. He leads Mixtec workshops on empowering community youth to lead revitalization programs and pursue higher education while using Mixtec.
Katerina Rain is a Stoney-Nakota woman from Paul First Nation, AB and a second-language speaker of Stoney-Nakota. She is also a first-year Linguistics student at the University of Alberta and works with the Language Revitalization Program on Paul First Nation as a “Stoney Language Leader.” She works for the elders as a youth advocate for the Stoney-Nakota language; this work involves materials development, involving the youth in language learning, and, with collaboration of the elders, video/audio recording of language data for long-term preservation.
Talk Story 2: Enacting Relationality in Online Indigenous Language Education
Kari Chew, Lokosh, & Juliet Morgan
This Talk Story focuses on enacting relationality in online Indigenous language education. As scholar-practitioners who have developed an online Indigenous language course, we will engage participants in discussion about relationality in virtual spaces. This session will interest new and experienced online Indigenous language educators.
Dr. Kari A. B. Chew is a Chickasaw citizen and language learner. She is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her scholarship focuses on the experiences of adult Indigenous language learners and the role of technology in Indigenous language education. She works closely with the Chickasaw Nation on online language education projects. She earned her doctorate from the University of Arizona in 2016 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the NEȾOLṈEW̱ “one mind, one people” Partnership at University of Victoria in 2020.
Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson) is of Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, and Euro-American ancestry and is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. A conversational speaker of the Chickasaw language and an award-winning artist, he holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Abilene Christian University, a master’s degree in Native American Art History from the University of New Mexico, and a PhD in Native Language Revitalization from the University of Oklahoma. He lives and works on the Chickasaw Nation Reservation, just outside of Ada, Oklahoma. Hinson, whose Chickasaw name Lokosh translates as “Gourd,” is of the Imatapo (Their Lean-to People) house group and Kowishto’ (Panther) clan.
Dr. Juliet Morgan has been working as a linguist for the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program for almost two years. Her 2017 dissertation focused on the acquisition of Chickasaw morphosyntax by adult language learners. In 2015, she joined the Rosetta Stone Chickasaw team to begin development and is still working on the final level of lessons. Her current work also includes assisting with curriculum development for the adult immersion program (the Chikasha Academy) and further documenting the grammar of current speakers and learners.
Talk Story 3: Resilient relationships: Lessons from working collaboratively at a distance
Bryn Hauk, Ruth Singer, Lynn Hou, Shobhana Chelliah, Duke Earl-Spurr, & Clifton Girgirba
This Talk Story facilitates conversations on the success and challenges of carrying out language projects and maintaining relationships at a distance. Together we build a collaborative written record of lessons learned from the current pandemic, which can serve to guide future language documentation projects where distance is a factor.
Bryn Hauk received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2020. Since 2015 she has spent more than nine months in Georgia, working with speakers of Tsova-Tush, an endangered Northeast Caucasian language. Presently, her ability to continue collaborating with this community and to assist with an orthography development project has met challenges due to the pandemic. Bryn continues to work on numerous aspects of Tsova-Tush documentation and description from available corpora and is seeking creative solutions for honoring her community partnership at a distance.
Shobhana Chelliah is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of North Texas. She continues to work with communities in Northeast India on language documentation projects through virtual reading groups, and online tutorials on archiving and language description. She is working with linguists Kelly Berkson and Ken Van Bik and health information specialist Sara Champlin to document, over ZOOM, US Chin community experiences with CoVID. She is also working with depositors and metadata creators virtually to build the Computational Resource of South Asian Languages Archive.
Ruth Singer is a linguist and linguistic anthropologist based at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has been working with Warruwi Community, an Indigenous Australian community since 2002. Her collaborative research on multilingualism incorporates training community members in language documentation skills, producing films with young people and making accessible digital resources. Over the past 10 years, Ruth and the community have found new ways of working together, which do not rely on Ruth travelling to Warruwi. This has allowed some of their joint activities to continue, despite restrictions on travel due to the pandemic.
Duke (Garry) Earl-Spurr is from Perth, Western Australia. After graduating from the ANU in 2015 with Honours in Language Studies, Duke moved to the East Pilbara in mid-2016 to work as an applied linguist for Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa (KJ) – which involved first spending 6 months as an intern being taught to speak Manyjilyjarra by many Martu teachers and mentors at KJ. KJ is a Martu community-development organisation that aims to keep country and culture strong and to build sustainable Martu communities. Since 2016, KJ’s language program has gained strong momentum as language has become integrated into all facets of KJ’s work.
Lynn Hou
Lynn Hou is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at University of California, Santa Barbara. As a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin, she started researching “making hands”: a constellation of family sign languages in the San Juan Quiahije municipality, a Mesoamerican indigenous (Chatino) community in Mexico. Her research is both linguistic and ethnographic, encompassing the documentation of making hands with a focus on child signers. Presently, her fieldwork plans have been suspended due to the ongoing pandemic, and she has limited communication with her collaborators, so she is analyzing old data and considering the implications of these constraints.
Clifton Girgirba is a Manyjilyjarra man from the Western Desert in Western Australia who identifies with the Kuny-kuny, Kunawariji, and Wuulkurta living waterholes. Clifton has an abiding commitment to the preservation of Martu languages. His grandparents are senior elders, and he has spent his life learning knowledge of his country from them. He has been a core participant in the Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa (KJ) Martu Leadership Program and is vocal about young people learning their culture, country, and languages. Clifton has recently started a diversionary program (Wama Wangka) founded in transmission of cultural knowledge of Martu country to younger generations.
Talk Story 4: Ahu Kupanaha ka Lā i Mānā: Facing the Challenge of Online Indigenous Language Immersion Schooling
Kalehua Krug & Kamuela Yim
This Talk Story presentation is designed to critically analyze and discuss the potential relationships necessary, during and following the current pandemic, between indigenous language revitalization institutions and state educational systems to address the integrity and appropriateness of 100% Virtual online learning models for indigenous language revitalization.
Kalehua Krug
Kalehua Krug Ph.D. is the principal at Ka Waihona o ka Naʻauao Public Charter School, a culturally focused school in Nānākuli, Oʻahu. He is a former Hawaiian Immersion teacher and teacher educator and the former administrator of Ka Papahana Kaiapuni, Hawaiian Immersion Program of the Department of Education.
Kamuela Yim
Kamuela Yim is a former Hawaiian Immersion teacher and sat as the Director of Education for Kākoʻo ʻŌiwi, a culturally focused agricultural sustainability model in Heʻeia, Oʻahu. He also works as a translation mentor for Awaiāulu Hawaiian Language Resource Center and currently works as a system administrator of Ka Papahana Kaiapuni in the Department of Education.
Talk Story 5: Approaches to prescriptivism in language revitalization
Sally Akevai Nicholas, James Uri-Puati, Yvonne Underhill-Sem
What is the role of prescriptivism in language revitalization contexts? How do we navigate the potentially competing interests or preferences of teachers, learners and linguists while caring for the complex relationships between language revitalization stakeholders and supporters?
I am a New Zealand born Cook Islander and made the decision 18 years ago in 2003, to return and discover more about my Cook Islands roots. While my family and I relocated for a contracted short period of time, we all decided that we would like to make Rarotonga our home and have been living here since. I am an educator of 32 years and have worked in a variety of schools and educational institutes. I have also spent time while based here in the Cooks carry out various local, regional and international consultancy contracts. This has given me a wide breadth of experience in other areas outside of education e.g. Institutional Governance, Human Rights. I am currently a teaching contractor as well as facilitating and managing international volunteering opportunities for people in the Cook Islands.
Dr. Ake Nicholas is an member of the Ngāti Teꞌakatauira people of Maꞌuke (Cook Islands). She currently is a lecturer in linguistics at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa (Massey University) in Auckland, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the description, documentation, and revitalization of Cook Islands Māori and New Zealand Māori. She also works on matters of linguistic justice, and language revitalisation more broadly. Ake has a particular interest in how young people can be encouraged to learn and use their ancestral languages.
Talk Story 6: Developing relationships between public health specialists, linguists and indigenous communities
Vasiliki Vita, Pierpaolo di Carlo, Margaret Chenemo, & Katarzyna Kordas
This Talk Story aims at encouraging an interdisciplinary dialogue on the importance of developing a network of health specialists, linguists and indigenous community members for the fight against health issues faced by indigenous communities around the world, with virALLanguages as the launching point.
Vasiliki Vita is a student of the Master’s degree on Language Documentation and Description at SOAS, University of London. Her academic interests include Austronesian linguistics, language documentation and revitalisation and applied linguistics in general. Her MA thesis focuses on the prosodic patterns of Ramari Hatohobei, an endangered Micronesian language spoken in the Republic of Palau, while her desire is to create a multimodal documentation of Sonsorolese, a relative language. She is also a teacher of Greek and English and the Social Media Coordinator of the virALLanguages project.
Pierpaolo Di Carlo is postdoctoral associate at the Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo – SUNY. His areas of interest include the study of traditional forms of multilingualism in rural Africa, language documentation, African anthropology, and the languages and societies of the Hindu-Kush area (Pakistan – Afghanistan). Pierpaolo has done extensive fieldwork in Pakistan and Cameroon, has published in journals like “Language” and the “International Journal of the Sociology of Language”, and currently coordinates both a research project called KPAAM-CAM (PI Jeff Good) and the virALLanguages initiative.
Margaret Chenemo is a holder of a PhD in Sociolinguistics from the University of Yaounde I, Cameroon, in June 2020. Her area of competence being data gathering and treatment from naturally occurring social and cultural events, in communities whose languages are being endangered. This is done using best practices of multimedia language documentation methods. Margaret, who happened to have spent her early life in rural communities in the North West Region of Cameroon, had the advantage of getting acquainted with rural customs and traditions. Her 25 year experience in civil service as a secondary and high school teacher, coupled with her aspiration for a job well done, her resourcefulness and self confidence have been established from her research in highly interdisciplinary studies.
Dr. Kordas received her PhD in International Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University, followed by a research associate position in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the T.H. Chan Harvard School of Public Health. Currently, Kordas is an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health and co-directs the Community for Global Health Equity at the University at Buffalo.
Talk Story 7: Reflection and collaboration for culturally responsive visual design in language resources
Haoyi Li & Kathrin Kaiser
What should a language tool look like? In this session, we invite participants to reflect on the cultural implications of user-interface design and the impact of visual conventions on language learning. We will work with a toolkit which facilitates collaboration between communities and external stakeholders to co-develop visually enriched resources.
Haoyi is a current PhD candidate in Linguistics at the Australian National University, working on Yolŋu Matha, an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in the Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory. She has a background in art history as well as linguistics (University of Melbourne, 2018), and is generally interested in interdisciplinary methodologies and the intersection between language and art. Haoyi has been passionate about language revitalisation ever since volunteering with Living Languages in 2018-2019 and aims to create tangible outcomes that benefit language communities from her research.
Kathrin is a PhD student at the University of Queensland where she investigates the potential of interactive fiction for language learning, and the design of story-based language applications to support the revival of indigenous languages. Working on language learning games at an educational technologies startup, and recently on a language adventure game together with members of the Ktunaxa in North America, she realizes the importance of appropriate visual strategies to support the learning process. In her workshops, Kathrin favours project-based learning and participatory design, and she is keen to learn through collaboration, exchanging ideas and experiences with her collaborators.