Tag Archives: volunteers

Endangered Language Activism, Indigenous Language Activists, Media and Publicity, Support Endangered Languages

BODY OF WORDS: Announcing our Guest Blog Series on Language Loss

by Anna Luisa Daigneault

What is a language? A cultural code, an invisible ink, the sonic architecture of how we think… A language is a breath of life, and when it is endangered, it becomes a fragile treasure. Webs of meaning start to fade, carrying with them stories untold, and impoverishing humanity as a whole.

What is a linguist? A wordsmith, a lover of terms…    A deep-sea diver of minds. A sorter, a hacker, a surgeon of the soul – a kind of acrobat who goes careening into structural unknowns. A linguist of under-documented languages is an explorer who seeks to study  languages that are well-known to its native speakers, but new to science.

Whether we speak one language or five, language defines our human experience. All of our interactions and communication are mediated by language. For those of us who love languages, we cannot deny the troubling nature of the following fact: more than half of the world’s languages and dialects are going to disappear in the next century. What does that mean for the speakers of those languages? What does it mean for humanity?

This unprecedented decrease in linguistic diversity is linked to globalization, among many other factors. It is time for the public to be aware about these issues, and to share opinions in the global dialog about endangered languages.

Along with two guest writers, Allison Taylor-Adams and Indira Sarma, I am starting a summer guest blog series entitled Body of Words. We hope that you will help us spread the word about our blog series, and respond to our posts with questions and comments.

We will be discussing various issues surrounding language loss and recovery, including: the impact of boarding schools on speakers of indigenous languages, the use of new technologies and social media in language revitalization, knowledge systems encoded in languages and what their loss means for mankind, challenges in language documentation and other relevant subjects.

By discussing these issues, we hope to dispel some of the misconceptions about endangered languages, celebrate language diversity and promote efforts currently underway to protect endangered languages. Stay tuned for our first article in the series, coming out on July 4th, 2012.

Living Tongues Institute regularly encounters perspectives on language endangerment that we believe our blog readers would find thought-provoking, fascinating, debatable and challenging. This guest blog series is a forum for such opinions. The views expressed belong to the author and are not necessarily shared by Living Tongues Institute.

 

Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Indigenous Language Activists, K. David Harrison, Language Hotspots, Launches and Public Events, Media and Publicity, Support Endangered Languages

Launching New Site on Endangered Languages With Google!

Along with many other organizations, we have collaborated with Google to launch a new website: http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

“The Endangered Languages Project” is an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat.

Our language documentation videos from our Youtube channel are prominently featured throughout the site. On the site’s main page, a picture of Koro speaker Abamu Degio is featured. The picture was taken by Living Tongues researcher Jeremy Fahringer.

The languages included in this project and the information displayed about them are provided by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat), produced by the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and The Institute for Language Information and Technology (The Linguist List) at Eastern Michigan University.

Follow us on Twitter as @livingtongues to see our posts about the many media articles coming out about this new site!

Digital Resources, Endangered Language Activism, Gregory D. S. Anderson, K. David Harrison, Language Hotspots, Support Endangered Languages

Thank you, volunteers!

During the last year, June 2011 to May 2012, we have welcomed many wonderful people as online volunteer researchers at Living Tongues! Most of them have been involved doing online data entry and research for our database on endangered languages. We have been lucky to work with talented, passionate individuals from all over the world who hail from diverse fields such as linguistics, anthropology and other social sciences, information technology, literature, classics, communications, computer science, history, international development and many other fields.

The volunteers were selected based on the quality of their applications. They worked from home or from school, collaborated with us online through email and Skype, many of them also helped us spread the word about our campaigns through social media. Our volunteers so far have been undergraduate students, doctoral candidates, professors, media professionals, humanitarian aid workers, and people in many other lines of work who are concerned about language endangerment. We would like to thank all of our volunteers for taking the time to do research on endangered languages, and contribute to raising awareness about language extinction. From all of us at Living Tongues,

THANK YOU!

We would like to recognize our volunteers (those who worked at different times between June 2011 – May 2012) for their efforts by listing their names below, according to the areas of the world that they worked on within our database:

North America: Sharina Kim, Eleanor Ellis, Kim Cooper, Ellen Olson, Emmy Haskett, Patricia Blatter, Rachel Maynard, Brittany Williams.

Latin America: Eleanor Pollo, Laura Backus, Molly Allison-Baker, Tanager, Natalie Feingold, Kaitlin Caruso, Eleanor Ellis, Rebecca Orford, Megan Barnett, Katie Lackler, Denis Vidal, Olga Izquierdo Sotorrio, Kim Factor.

Australia: Michelle Hunsicker, Daniel Sachs, Kate Lynn Lindsey, Rachel Maynard

Eastern Melanesia and Papua New Guinea: Julie Kanakanui, Louward Allen Zubiri and his students at the University of the Philippines, Kristin Denham and her students at Western Washington University, Erik Joel West, Claire Fallat, Lorraine Elletson, Katie Claybough, Sarah Truesdale, Julia MacNeely, Victoria Dwight, Jessica Winters

Taiwan & Phillippines: Priyanka Sinha, Murray Tong, Louward Allen Zubiri and his students at the University of the Philippines

Caucasus: Erin Simpson

Siberia: Spencer J. Campbell, Kim Hegerberg

Africa: Rachel Eidson, Riordan Woods, Kristy Spiak

Database logistics and support with guidelines: Kimberly Gladman, David Pippin, Julie Kanakanui.

Other projects: Denice Szafran (resource compiling), Ken-Terika Zellner and David Baxter and their fellow group members (BABEL project on Endangered Numeral Systems of the World).

“International Mother Language Day” events volunteer coordinators: Natalie Feingold, Ken-Terika Zellner, David Baxter.

Volunteer coordination: Anna Luisa Daigneault, Dr. Gregory DS Anderson

Database management: Anna Luisa Daigneault, Jeremy Fahringer, Dr. Gregory D.S. Anderson, Dr. K. David Harrison

We are happy to announce we are welcoming a new team of online volunteer researchers and two new guest bloggers starting in June 2012, and we are looking forward to working with them as well.

For news related to upcoming volunteer positions at Living Tongues, keep track of us on our volunteer information page.

Gregory D. S. Anderson, Language Hotspots, Launches and Public Events, Support Endangered Languages, Workshops

1st Annual “Language Hotspots Workshop” Success!

Monday, July 25th, 2011

By Anna Luisa Daigneault

The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages held the first annual “Language Hotspots Workshop” from July 11th to 14th, 2011 at the Center for Ancient Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. Ten young scholars from various colleges around the country attended the workshop held at the Center for Ancient Studies and Archaeology at Willamette University http://www.willamette.edu/centers/casa/. The workshop was facilitated by Living Tongues Director Dr. Gregory DS Anderson and Organizational Fellow Anna Luisa Daigneault.

The workshop participants were all Living Tongues volunteer researchers currently working on the Language Hotspots Database Project, an ongoing collaborative digital project that is compiling the latest linguistic, anthropological and topographic data on endangered languages to create an innovative online research tool that will be used by scholars as well as speakers of endangered languages. The volunteer researchers are: Natalie Feingold, Eleanor Pollo, Tanager, Erik Joel West, Rachel Eidson, Victoria Osborne, Claire Fallat, Emmy Haskett and Living Tongues intern Cameron French. Data management expert Kimberly Gladman was also involved via Skype. Students represented such schools as University of Oregon, Willamette University, University of the Pacific, Evergreen State University, University of Melbourne, and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The goal of the event was to inform the participants about the latest research concerning Language Hotspots, specific areas of the world where many endangered languages are clustered. These hotspots exhibit high levels of linguistic diversity as well as high levels of endangerment. Language Hotspots also contain languages that are under-documented, meaning that they lack formal linguistic documentation and language tools such as texts, dictionaries, descriptive grammars and audio-visual materials, which are important for systematic conservation and revitalization efforts by future generations.

This workshop was a platform for participants to learn more about the distribution of Language Hotspots around the world. On Day 1, they learned about the analytical aspects of the model, and focused on recent Living Tongues fieldwork that took place in Eastern Melanesia. Day 2 focused on Database Quality Control methodology, as well as linguistic fieldwork in Siberia. Day 3 focused on the endangered languages of the Americas, and Day 4 was devoted to learning about phonetics and doing linguistic transcription exercises involving many languages located in the Language Hotspots around he world.

The workshop was a great success and all the participants left in high spirits, and will also continue to contribute the first Language Hotspots Database. They each received a Living Tongues silk-screened canvas tote bag (see picture below).