Survey Methods
Keren Rice
Mary Linn
Course Information
Planning is an essential part of language revitalization. Surveys, sometimes required by funding sources, are an important tool for planning. In this workshop, we will discuss questions about surveys, such as: What can we learn from a survey? How can surveys help in revitalization? What different kinds of surveys are there? What kinds of questions should we ask? Who should carry out a survey and how should a survey be given? What do we do with the results?
We will use Handbook 3: Conducting a Language Survey (from Awakening Our Languages: ILI Handbook Series) as a starting point for classroom discussions. Participants will work in groups to develop survey questions and give short surveys to each other to practice reading and presenting results. The goal is for participants to leave with a creative toolset for using surveys in their own communities or language programs.
Course Documents
Syllabus
Cherokee Survey
Daghida Survey
Omaha Language Survey
Ponca Survey
Sauk Survey
Tokelau Language Survey
Unesco Vitality Diversity Questionnaire1
Yakama Shaptin Survey
Instructor(s) Bio
Keren Rice (University of Toronto; Organizing Committee and taught, InField 2008) has done extensive fieldwork in northern Canada and was awarded the first Bloomfield Book Award for her Grammar of Slave, published by Mouton de Gruyter. She has been involved in community-based fieldwork and teaching, designed a course on language revitalization, and oversaw the development of a website on fieldwork. She is editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics. She served a term on the governing board of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council in Canada as well as a term as president of the Canadian Linguistic Association, and she currently is co-chair of the Program Committee of the Linguistic Society of America. She has organized many international conferences. She was founding director of Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto, a post that she held for fifteen years.
Mary S. Linn (Associate Curator of Native American Languages, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History; Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, University of Oklahoma) specializes in Euchee and languages of the Southeast. She has worked in language documentation, description, and revitalization in Oklahoma since 1990, and teaches workshops in linguistics and language teaching methodology through the Oklahoma Native Language Association. She directs the MA program in Applied Linguistic Anthropology. In 2002, she began the Native American Languages collection at the museum, focusing on Oklahoma languages and community language needs. The museum will host its first Breath of Life workshop this spring.