Language and Healthcare

Brent Henderson

Peter Rohloff

This course explores surprising connections between language and global health efforts. Globally, healthcare providers in developing countries implement healthcare solutions with little or no regard for indigenous languages and cultures. This can dramatically increase the pressures of language shift to regionally dominant languages. This course will review new methodologies in addressing global health needs that take local languages and cultures seriously. We will review literature that suggests such methods create more effective health outcomes and can lead to major advances in indigenous language maintenance and revitalization. Participants will work through case studies interactively based on real fieldwork experiences. They will also develop proposals for language projects that a have healthcare component, or for healthcare projects that have language revitalization as an outcome.

Henderson and Rohloff have 10+ years experience in this area through their work with Maya Health Alliance, a healthcare NGO that serves indigenous Maya in rural Guatemala.