Linguistics, Wugs and Whimsy

Today, I had the great joy of being able to virtually attend the University of Buffalo’s Digital Scholarship Studio and Network conference, titled Digital Engagement with Endangered Languages and Their Communities. Shout-out to Professor M for telling me about the event!

Four presenters gave excellent presentations about language documentation and preservation, and what is entailed throughout the process of such work. I found each talk to be very enriching and engaging.

Erin Debenport was the first to present, with her presentation being titled Language Circulation and Control: Strategic Uses for Digital Technologies in Pueblo Reclamation Projects. Debenport brought up some very important points and things to remember when working in language preservation, reclamation, and revitalization. The first being that it is essential to tailor language policies to their most appropriate contexts. This means that when one is working alongside a community conducting language preservation, reclamation, and revitalization work, it is the job of the linguist or language worker to understand what the community needs and how they could best be assisted. It is also the job of the linguist or language worker to understand that there is no one ultimately correct way to correct, document, and preserve languages. Instead, language preservation is a joint effort between members of a community and outside members that often requires years of dedication and perseverance.

Next up in the presenter line was Eladio Mateo Toledo, whose presentation is titled TZ’IB’MA: Phonemic digital keyboard in cell phones for Mayan languages. At the beginning of his presentation, Toledo gave some statistics about endangered languages, stating that around 19% of the world’s languages are in a vital state, or coming close to being endangered, a statistic from Simon and Lewis (2013). Methods for Mayan language preservation need to be tailored to each language based on its population of users, not universal cut-and-paste approaches from the language documentation field as a whole. This is because language revitalization is multidimensional, as it includes cultural, historical, and political factors. Toledo listed some projects which take this multidimensional approach: workshops of the study of Q’anjob’al, Project LEA: Literacy in Awakateko, and TZ’IB’MA, the name given to the keyboard systems which have been developed to write eight Mayan languages on cell phones so far. The keyboards are available for download on Android as well as iPhones and are phonemic, meaning that the letters provided represent sounds of respective Mayan languages. You could search for the keyboards on Google Play or on lenguasmayas.com. Developing these keyboards has taken an enormous amount of commitment and effort, with the vocabulary lists and texts often being edited and revised at least three or four times. Towards the end of the presentation, Toledo made some remarks which amused the audience: “Linguistics has kidnapped language revitalization. Language revitalization has to go outside of linguistics.” While linguists play important roles in preserving languages, other types of workers are crucial to this process and need to be included and recognized too, such as anthropologists, community members, government workers, and other advocates.

Jesse Stewart gave his presentation about a language called Media Lengua, called Media Lengua in the Digital Age: A Journey of Preservation and Reclamation. At the beginning of his talk, Jesse misspoke, saying “endangerous” when he meant to say “endangered”, much to the amusement of the audience. Actually, his slight misspeak was not too much of a mistake, given that the entire conference had a central theme of advocating for smaller, minority languages. Due to linguicide, the negative effects that lead to language extinction through either natural or political forces, many languages around the world are endangered. Jesse has worked extensively to document Media Lengua, a mixed language that contains elements of Kichwa/Quechua and Spanish. Part of his work has been to help produce Stories and Traditions of the Pijal, which documents the lives of the people he has worked with and is available for free online. He has published part of the dictionary work that has been completed for Media Lengua on the journal Dictionaria, which could be viewed online. The process thus far for recording and preserving Media Lengua has been quite time-consuming: not only has this work needed a revised and consistently-updated vocabulary list, it has also required that all words which became entered in the dictionary to also be written in the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Replanting the Forests in Language Ecosystems, presented by X’unei Lance Twitchell, was the final presentation given, and it was quite moving. What I particularly enjoyed about this one was that the audience had a direct chance to hear the perspective of an indigenous person who is involved in language preservation work, which is always important and refreshing. It reminded me of the plenary talk at CoLang 2022 given by Wesley Leonard, who got a shout-out in X’unei’s talk also. X’unei emphasized that being heard and listened to is the first part of acknowledgement that language users all want for themselves, especially in indigenous communities. He mentioned the phrase “go fluent yourself”, a phrase that is meant to encourage others to think about language and its importance, and to heavily consider using it responsibly. There must be a re-establishment of pride and prestige for indigenous and minority languages, Twitchell noted. Language preservation is about “protecting the speakers you have while making new ones,” a particular line I will carry with me going forward. X’unei shared two quotes that served as a perfect wrap-up for the day’s event: “there is a spirit in everything” and “nothing measures up to our language.”

Good morning, afternoon, and evening, dear readers. In today’s post, I will be sharing my experience from the CoLang 2022 conference.

CoLang is short for The Institute on Collaborative Language Research. Founded in 2008 by linguist Carol Genetti, Colang has been hosted at several respected universities, with its first hosting being at University of California, Santa Barbara. Since then, it has been hosted every two years at a different university, with the exception being to COVID, of course.

According to CoLang’s official website, colanginstitute.org, “At that time, it was called the Institute on Field Linguistics and Language Documentation, or InField. The name was changed to CoLang before the 2012 institute to emphasize the collaborative aspect of work with and by language communities.”

This year, CoLang took place at the University of Montana in Missoula, and lasted from June 13th to July 8th. Workshops ran for the first two weeks, and a practicum for either the Northern Cheyenne or Bolivian Quechua languages for the last two.

The goal of CoLang is to foster “hands-on experiences in best practices for language documentation, descriptive linguistics, and language revitalization for linguists, researchers, students of all levels, community members, tribal leadership, language advocates and allies, and other individuals interested in community-based language work.”

Essentially, the goal of CoLang is to bring together people from all different kinds of backgrounds to work together to preserve and advocate for languages with small amounts of speakers.

I stayed for the full month and immensely enjoyed the whole experience. The workshops were enriching, informative, and engaging, while the practica was a memorable learning experience.

I especially enjoyed going to the afternoon presentations after lunch. Of the 8 which were available, my personal favorite was by Wesley Leonard, a professor at University of California at Riverside. His talk focused on the importance of relational accountability in language work, and how showing up for yourself and others and being committed to learning makes a big difference in communities as well as yourself. Wesley was the first to present in the afternoon series, and hearing his talk was truly life-changing.

I chose to attend the FLEx, Praat, ELAN, Intro to Linguistics 1 and 2, Language Activism, TPR, Total Physical Response, which is a teaching method that has found recent popularity recently, and Language, Culture, and Climate Change in the Arctic workshops.

FLEx, Praat, and ELAN are all softwares that linguists use for various projects, each of them serving a different purpose. Out of the eight workshops I attended, I think these were my top three favorites, though each workshop was really fun and informative.

For the practica, I selected the Northern Cheyenne option. Northern Cheyenne is a Native American and Indigenous language spoken in Montana. There is also another dialect, which is called Southern Cheyenne, and spoken in Oklahoma.

During the practica, participants were able to collaborate on projects which put the skills from the workshops into use. During my practica, I worked with a peer to create language learning materials for Cheyenne youth. While this was fun to work on, it wasn’t what i was expecting: I was hoping the practica would be more language documentation-based, and that we would get to focus on speaking with elders, collaborating with them to document their language, update and maintain language databases, and learn more about how to be better language advocates.

On the last day, everyone was given a chance to present what they had been working on for the past 2 weeks. My peer and I were embarrassed by two of the facilitators for using a sample video of Southern Cheyenne speakers to show pronunciation. Given that we didn’t have time with the native Northern Cheyenne speakers after week 1 ended, this was our only option. There were also other instances where clear preference and bias was shown towards projects that included certain elements over others, which was not fair, though this was the nature of the practicum.

I was also surprised in an unpleasant way by some of the attitudes at this conference. Most of the attendees were linguists or linguistics students, while some were community members of indigenous backgrounds, or people who were otherwise interested in the topics of the conference. Among the non-linguists, there was a very-present anti-linguist and anti-linguistics attitude. Not everyone shared this sentiment, but more people than expected did. After all, CoLang is a conference that has been heavily-populated by linguists since its inception.

In the past, some linguists have worked with minority communities in unfair and unethical ways. The linguists did this by showing up to these communities, mostly uninvited, collected their data for research, left, and provided no compensation for their contributors. If this doesn’t raise red flags, it most definitely should.

This is the very instance which CoLang seeks to work against and move forward from. While it is important to remember and learn from the past, we as a collective group of linguists, advocates, activists, language reclamationists, community members, and language workers cannot move forward if time is spent complaining about obviatives or how linguistics could very easily become complicated..

Linguistics, especially in its higher levels, is challenging. But while this is so, it also has immense value as a subject. Linguistics teaches and helps others learn about how language works, why it works, and how all the parts of a language matter. This framework and mindset is essential, especially in a field such as language reclamation, documentation, and advocacy.

I am very much looking forward to the next CoLang, which will be hosted in 2024 at Arizona State University. I will include the link to the upcoming conference, as well as the general CoLang site below.

https://www.colang2024.org/

https://www.colanginstitute.org/