Using Ethnography in Language Documentation

Sarah Shulist

This workshop will train participants to use ethnographic methodologies to support the development and implementation of projects for language documentation and revitalization. Students, ideally, will be community and academic linguists with an intermediate to advanced level of knowledge about language programs, but without any extensive training in anthropology and ethnography. The goal is to provide this group of language activists with an additional set of tools for use in enhancing the efficacy and comprehensiveness of their documentary and revitalization work. The workshop sessions will address such topics as: applying anthropological concepts to documenting languages; understanding relationships among social roles, status, and language use; identifying and categorizing genres of language; understanding language ideologies; and understanding the political and institutional contexts for documentation and revitalization.