CoLang 2012

About | Photos | Organizers | Advisory Circle | Sponsors and Partners | Workshops | Practica | Steps and Models | CoLang Charter | Posters

About

Archived Original Website: https://web.archive.org/web/20150428151744/http://idrh.ku.edu/colang2012

CoLang 2012 was a six-week Institute on Collabora­tive Lan­guage Re­search (formerly InField), held at the University of Kansas in the sum­mer of 2012, sponosred by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The Institute provided an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students, prac­ticing lin­guists, and community linguists to become trained in a wide range of skills in community-cen­tered language documentation. Suc­cess­fully held in 2008 (UCSB) and 2010 (U of Oregon), and to be held in 2014 at the U of N Texas, the six-week insti­tute consists of two parts: the Work­shops - two weeks of intensive workshops on the practice of documentary linguistics – followed by a Practicum – a four-week apprenticeship in the applica­tion of linguis­tic science and techno­logy to on-site empirical documentation (a.k.a. “field linguis­tics”). The two parts are integrated, as students who enroll in the Practicum are required to enroll in the preceding Workshops, thereby re­ceiving an intensive course in docu­mentary best practices before putting these skills to use. Participants may choose to enroll only in the two-week Work­shops.

Photos

Organizers

Organizers

Co-Lang Institute Charter (June 2011 draft)

• Advisory Circle (ad hoc)

• Co-Lang 2012 Local Organizing Committee

• Co-Lang Sponsors

Staff

Arienne Dwyer & Carlos Nash, Co-Directors

Jari Billiot, Assistant Director
Jenn Vang, Institute Assistant

Instructors

• Anthony Aristar (Eastern Michigan University, LINGUIST List)

• Helen Aristar-Dry (Eastern Michigan University, LINGUIST List)

• Albert Bickford (SIL International)

• Kennedy Bosire (Ekegusii Language Project)

• Claire Bowern (Yale University)

• Amy Brunett (LinguistList)

• Beth Bryson (SIL International)

• Phil Cash Cash (Nez Perce; University of Arizona)

• Arienne M Dwyer (University of Kansas)

• Yamina El-Kirat (University Mohammed V-Agdal, Rabat)

• Stephanie Fielding (Mohegan)

• Colleen Fitzgerald (University of Texas, Arlington)

• Patrick Flor (University of Kansas)

• Susan Gehr (Karuk)

• Spike Gildea (University of Oregon)

• Marsha Hotch (Tlingit)

• Kelly Kindscher (University of Kansas)

• Mary Linn (University of Oklahoma)

• Bradley McDonnell (University California, Santa Barbara)

• Brad Montgomery-Anderson (Northeastern State University)

• Toshihide Nakayama (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)

• Carlos M Nash (University of Kansas)

• Tsuyoshi Ono (University of Alberta)

• Keren Rice (University of Toronto)

• Patricia Shaw (University of British Columbia)

• Alice Taff (University of Alaska, Southeast)

• Joshua Thompson (LinguistList)

• Eno-Abasi Urua (University of Uyo)

• Doug Whalen (CUNY Graduate Center & Haskins Laboratories)

• Racquel Yamada (University of Oklahoma)

Advisory Circle

Ad hoc Governance Circle

• Phil Cash Cash

• Colleen Fitzgerald

• Margaret Florey

• Carol Genetti

• Spike Gildea

• Mary Linn

• Toshihide Nakayama

• Keren Rice

• Pat Shaw, SSILA Liaison

• Eno Abasi Urua

Sponsors and Partners

The US National Science Foundation is our primary sponsor. We gratefully acknowledge the following additional contributors for participant scholarships:

• CUNY Graduate Center, Linguistics Department

• The Endangered Language Fund

• KU Native Faculty and Staff Council

• Queens College, Department of Linguistics & Communication Disorders

• University of Wisconsin, Department of Linguistics

• Dr. Ronnie Wilbur, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, Purdue University

• Dr. Walt Wolfram, Distinguished Professor, North Carolina State University

• Dr. Toshihide Nakayama, Distinguished Professor, ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

• Dr. Catherine O'Connor, Distinguished Professor, Boston University

We gratefully acknowledge the office of Kansas Senator Steven Moran for its assistance in visa matters for Participants

CoLang 2012 is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Program, NSF-BCS1065469

Workshops

Workshop Schedules

https://web.archive.org/web/20150424032430/http://idrh.ku.edu/sites/idrh.drupal.ku.edu/files/files/colang2012/WorkshopsSched_4JUNE2.pdf

Workshop Tracks

How to use this section?

Peruse the course descriptions and the schedule, select the courses that you would like to take, and then register. These choices are not “set in stone.” You may revise them with a CoLang 2012 advisor during spring 2012. The advisor will contact you after you have registered. Courses are 4 hours unless otherwise noted; please see the Workshops Schedule to choose courses that meet during the same time period. The sample schedules below avoid course conflicts. Participants will choose 16 workshops (64 hours total). All participants will attend the first- and last-day plenaries, and the daily Models talks after lunch.

Sample tracks

Sample #1:

A community linguist who was newly involved with a language reacqui­sition project and/or a heritage language program would likely take Introduction to Linguistics 1 & 2 (8 hours), Audio 1, Video 1, Blurring the Lines or Grantwriting, and then choose between electives for the remaining 8 hours (e.g., Strategies for a reacquisition project, or Pedagogical Grammars for a heritage language program, and other electives).

Sample #2:

Graduate or undergraduate students interested in beginning a language documentation project would likely take Life in Communities, Audio 1 & 2, Database 1 & 2, Grantwriting, and electives for the remaining hours (e.g., Ethnobiology, Pedagogical Grammars, or Internet & Multimedia Dissemination).

Sample#3:

A practicing linguist who is interested in re-tooling and acquiring new technological skills would likely take Audio 1 & 2 (or Video 1 & 2), Database 1 & 2, ELAN 1 & 2, and chose between electives for the remaining 4 hours (e.g., Life in Communities or Transcription).

Practica

2 - 27 July 2012

The Practicum is a four-week apprenticeship in the applica­tion of linguis­tic analysis and language techno­logy to on-site empirical documentation (a.k.a. “field linguis­tics”). Enrollment in the Practicum requires enrollment in the preceding Workshops (18 - 29 June 2012), so as to have an intensive course in docu­mentary best practices before putting these skills to use. We are pleased to announce that the 2012 Practicum languages are Amazigh, Uda, and Cherokee. A particular focus for the 2012 CoLang Practicum is efficient, state-of-the art technology-assisted documentation. A specialist will be available to assist all Practicum participants in workflow and technical aspects of the documentation process. For more information on the practicum languages and instructors, please follow the links below.

Amazigh (Berber)

Uda

Cherokee

**NOTE** The Tlinigit Practicum has been cancelled. Interested applicants may prioritize Practicum language choices on their application. As space is limited, early registration is encouraged, particularly for those with strong Practicum language preferences. We will do our best to give most early applicants their first choices. However, our experience has been that non-first-choices can often be fortuitous: multi-year partnerships at past InFields have emerged from participants ending up in a Practicum that they didn't expect to be in.

STEPS and Models

STEPS 1

18 June 2012, 8.30 am – 4.30 pm

Instructors: Alice Taff, Marsha Hotch, Kennedy Bosire, Carlos Nash, Helen Aristar-Dry, Anthony Aristar

Steps 1 is an all-day plenary Workshop held at the beginning of CoLang on 18 June 2012, 8.30am-4.30pm in Watson 3 West. Its goal is for participants to come away with a basic understanding of what it means to be an indigenous language learner in today’s world, and a conceptual understanding of how to collaborate in the creation and implementation of relevant endangered language projects/programs while working in Indigenous communities and/or Indian Country today. We also discuss the typical workflow of such projects and some of the many ethical issues that arise. It is our hope that we will be able to inspire every participant, whether linguist, Indigenous/First Nations person, Indigenous/First Nations linguist, scholar or friend, to create a work plan or list of ideas for future steps in their own language revitalization work. All of these issues are explored in more detail in the individual Workshops, which begin the following day.

STEPS 2

29 June 2012, 9 am – 12 noon Watson 3 West

Instructors: Colleen Fitzgerald, Stephanie Fielding, Carlos Nash and Arienne Dwyer

Steps 2 is a half-day plenary Workshop held at the end of CoLang on 29 June 2012, 9am-12 pm. Through review of the entire workflow as well as human and social issues, Steps 2 facilitates digestion of the overwhelming amount of information and practical experience gained in the previous two weeks. A facilitated discussion rounds out the morning closing session.

MODELS of Successful Documentation and Revitalization

19-22 June, 25-28 June 2012, 1-2pm Watson 3 West

Models a daily plenary lecture series given every non-plenary weekday of the Workshops from 1:00pm-2:00pm (). These talks are open to the public and designed to showcase a variety of approaches taken by different communities and community partners to maintain or revitalize their languages. Each day a presentation will be given by one or more practitioners who will discuss the context of languages under threat in their community and efforts that have been taken to maintain and/or revitalize their language. Many presenters cover a range of issues including historical factors leading to language contraction, contexts of language use, education and literacy, organizations, resources, goals, methods, training, challenges, and successes. As the presenters represent speech communities from across the world, we hope that this workshop will bring us all to a deeper understanding of the wide range of contexts in which language maintenance and revitalization work is taking place, as well as the importance of that context to a community’s selection of appropriate goals and techniques.

Models Schedule (all talks 1-2pm in Watson 3 West):

Tuesday, June 19

The Drama of Dictionaries: Borrowings and Diglossia in the Upper Sorbian Community

Elizabeth Spreng (independent scholar)

The emotional impact of a historical inequality, lexical change, and contemporary discussions about German borrowings are prerequisites to working with the Sorbs, an endangered-language community in eastern Germany. Through an anthropological approach focused on linguistic questions, I consider how Sorbs (currently numbering 10,000 Upper Sorbian speakers), encounter difficulties choosing between German and Sorbian resources. An ethnographic approach can inform language documentation by actively involving speakers in revealing how they are fighting for their language and experiencing everyday dramas about their lexical choices.

Speaker Bio: As a linguistic anthropologist, Dr. Elizabeth Spreng (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. 2011) investigates bilingualism, language endangerment, globalization, and emotions. During her doctoral research in Germany, Dr. Spreng worked closely with speakers of Upper Sorb, an endangered Slavic language. Her earlier research (Louisiana State U M.A., 2001) includes a discourse analysis of the 1999 Barbara Walters/Monica Lewinsky interview and a secondary project focused on Mardi Gras narratives.

Wednesday, June 20

North American Indian Sign Language Model

Melanie McKay-Cody

The grammar of signed languages embeds cultural information, just as that of spoken languages does. My presentation will briefly introduce signed languages grammar, and then contrast American Sign Language (ASL) with Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL). I explain some of the transcription system and analytic methods, and will demonstrate a number of culturally-specific signs.

Melanie McKay-Cody is Cherokee/Choctaw and European-American, from Oklahoma. She is a signed languages linguist and has expertise in American Indians who are deaf, hard of hearing and deaf-blind. She is a published author on the endangered Plains Indian Sign Language, and will be a PhD student in KU Anthropology beginning in August 2012.

Thursday, June 21

Pillow ears and stone foreigners in the corner: Long-term collaboration in Inner Asia

Wen Xiangcheng and Arienne Dwyer

When do pillows have ears but people no mouths? If foreigners sit in the corner of a Mangghuer household like a stone, can that be a good thing? Wen and Arienne began working together on 12 years ago on Mangghuer (mjg-se) linguistic and cultural practices as part of a larger documentation project on Mongolic and Turkic speakers in Amdo Tibet. In this talk, we reflect on our community-driven genre sampling, the uses and annoyances of foreign researchers, and illustrate these points with ethnographic video.

Speaker Bios: Wen Xiangcheng is a Mangghuer artist and current KU Anthropology graduate student who has been a central researcher in several linguistic and ethnomusicological research projects of his language and culture. He will soon embark on a video ethnography of the exotic Lawrence arts community. Arienne Dwyer has worked with and for Inner and Central Asian communities for over twenty years: Mangghuer/Monguor, Baonan, Wutun, Salar, Uyghur, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Amdo Tibetan, NW Chinese. She is P.I. and co-director of this Institute.

Friday, June 22

Collaborative Development of Tlingit Language Resources

Marsha Hotch (Tlingit) and Alice Taff (U Alaska-Fairbanks)

We will show Tlingit language print, audio, and video resources that are available to and useful for both learners and linguists. We’ll discuss the collaboration among individuals, tribes, corporations, funding agencies, and academics that has made these resources possible.

Speaker bios: Marsha Hotch is the youngest female first-language speaker of Tlingit. She has worked in her village and throughout the Tlingit region teaching the language in the schools and though community activities. She designed and implemented a mentor-apprentice and junior-apprentice program in her community, documenting program activities in video and audio and archiving the results. She has developed curriculum and facilitated language camps. She is currently working on transcription and translation projects, and teaching 2nd and 3rd year Tlingit at the U of Alaska-SE. She co-produced “Tlingit Time”, a radio show that continues to air statewide in Alaska, and received the Alaska Governor’s award for the Humanities in 2007 for her work with Tlingit language.

Alice Taff, PhD, is Research Asst. Prof. of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. She has worked with Unangam Tunuu (ale, Aleut), Deg Xinag (ing), Haida (hdn), and Tlingit (tli). She has recently been engaged in projects to video record conversations in Unangam Tunuu and Tlingit, and provides time-aligned transcription and translation for the recording. She collaborates with communities to in their efforts to implement language perpetuation efforts.

Monday, June 25

Amazigh Teaching Between Dialectology and Standardization, Loss and Revitalization/Maintenance

Yamina El-Kirat

The presentation will focus on the challenges facing the standardization of the Amazigh (Berber) language given the regional variations and the phenomenon of loss some varieties have been undergoing. The native speakers’ attitudes and perceptions of the teaching, standardization and officialization of the language will also be presented.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Yamina El-Kirat is a Professor of Lin­guistics in the English Department and current director of the research group Culture, language, Education, Society and Development and the doctoral program Studies in Language & Society at the University Mohammed V-Agdal in Rabat. Professor El Kirat has taught and carried out research in general and Amazigh linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, sociolinguistics and language endangerment) for more than 27 years. Professor El-Kirat is also offering a Practicum in Amazigh at KU this July.

Tuesday, June 26

Fishing in the Atlantic!

Eno-Abasi Urua

Uda is located close to the Atlantic Ocean in the oil-rich Niger Delta southeast of Nigeria, where maritime activities result in multilingualism and multiculturalism. As a result, the Uda language with its cultural practices has become highly endangered. The documentation of the Uda group is part of the Akwa Ibom State policy, but the methodology is a bit different than that for other languages of the area.

Documenting a language without the active involvement of community members often leads to failed projects, as Grinevald (2003) discusses. In the Uda documentation project, we report on how the active involvement and partnership between the academia and community members has led to refreshing and useful results. We shall, if time permits, discuss the other projects we are working on in Uyo, Nigeria.

Speaker bio: Eno-Abasi Urua teaches linguistics in the Department of Linguistics & Nigerian Languages, University of Uyo, Nigeria. Professor Urua is also offering a Practicum with two Uda Language Consultants at KU this July.

Wednesday, June 27

You Want Me to do What?

Stephanie Fielding (Mohegan)

The last fluent speaker of your tribe died over a hundred years ago. The first two attempts at reviving the language were expensive and unsuccessful. You are now the tribe’s Obi-Wan Kenobi…without a light saber, but not without resources. What do you do next? Building the lexicon and enriching the grammar; avoiding pitfalls; seeing to the tribe’s linguistic needs; using the technology available and teaching.

Speaker bio: Stephanie Fielding is a member of the Mohegan Tribal Council of Elders in Uncasville, Connecticut (USA) and holds an MA from MIT’s Linguistics department. She has created podcasts and language materials of Mohegan, largely based on her great-grandmother’s diaries: http://moheganlanguage.com/

Thursday, June 28

Wearing Different Hats: Collaborative Roles in Language Documentation and Revitalization

Lizette Peter, Tracy Hirata-Edds (University of Kansas)

This talk will present our experiences with various types of collaborative projects in language documentation and revitalization, including the diverse roles of participants. We will also discuss keys components and challenges of our collaborative work.

Speaker Bios: Lizette Peter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at the University of Kansas. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of TESOL and endangered language revitalization. Tracy Hirata-Edds is a Lecturer in the Applied English Center at the University of Kansas. Her interests include endangered language and cultural maintenance, revitalization, and documentation, as well as children’s first and second language development. Lizette and Tracy are working on several projects in collaboration with Cherokee Nation, including a language immersion school and a U.S. NSF-Documenting Endangered Languages- funded project to document Cherokee tone, a collaborative project that brings together colleagues from Cherokee Nation, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Kansas.

There will also be a Cherokee language Practicum in July at CoLang 2012.

CoLang Charter

Co-Lang: Institute for Collaborative Language Research

Charter

Draft amended and accepted: June 26, 2012

Solicitation for comments:

At a group meeting at the 2010 InField at the University of Oregon, there was discussion about establishing a charter. This draft grows out of that meeting; it was further discussed at a meeting at the LSA/SSILA in January 2012 and then circulated to the group for some feedback. We are circulating it again at this point and would like to reach consensus on procedures for selecting locations for future institutes, as these are relevant now for 2014. If we can agree on this (at least as far as 2014 goes, we can always modify it if it doesn’t seem to work well), then the rest of the document can be discussed and adopted at the meeting this summer.

Please give feedback on any and all parts of this! We will be happy to incorporate it.

This document outlines the overall mission of the Institute, as well as the principles guiding the Institute and each of its major components. The first section, Goals and Principles, is a direct reflection of the discussion at the University of Oregon. The second part, Structure, is a first guess, based on what happened with InField thus far, of the type of organizational structure that might be appropriate.

Note on terminology:

‘Institute’ is used throughout this document to refer to Co-Lang/InField.
‘Workshops’ refer to the two-week session of short courses.
‘Practicum’ refers to the 4-week session that in 2008 and 2010 was called ‘Field Methods Training.’

I. Goals and Principles

1. Goals of the Institute

• Provide training in how to document, maintain, revitalize, and renew languages;

• Facilitate ethical collaborations between academic and community linguists;

• Promote best practices for in situ language research and resource creation;

• Further linguistic theory by supporting the creation and sharing of repurposeable linguistic resources;

• Sustain language diversity, by promoting the creation of lasting resources on under-described languages and assisting community-based language activists in developing skills that will support their work;

• Advocate locally and globally for support of languages.

2. Principles guiding the Institute

• Collaborative learning, in which all are contributors with participants and instructors teaching and learning together;

• Collaborative teaching, with multidisciplinary, indigenous, and non-indigenous expertise;

• Collaborative research, with participation at every level by those community members whose languages are at stake;

• Inclusivity, with international orientation and encouraging of participants from all backgrounds;

• Accessibility, by removing barriers to language documentation and creating accessible resources;

• Outreach, using networks to reach academic and community linguists to foster synergistic training events and the dissemination of the products of language documentation.

• Advocacy, to support language initiatives and language minority communities around the world.

3. Goals for Institute Teaching: Workshops and the Practicum

Workshops:
Start or deepen understanding of holistic, collaborative language documentation processes and tools, including their linguistic, ethical, practical, and technical dimensions.

Practicum:
Apply the linguistic, ethical, practical, and technical skills gained in the Workshops in a guided apprenticeship with native-speaker consultants and an instructor.

II. Institute structure

1. Meeting time and length

The Institute meets every other summer in even-numbered years (in off-years from the Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute). The Institute consists of approximately two weeks of workshops followed by a practicum that is usually a month long.

2. Governance

a. Advisory Circle
There shall be an ongoing Advisory Circle for the Institute. The Advisory Circle ensures continuity of practice for the Institute, while at the same time recognizing the need for change. It provides stewardship of the Institute, ensures appropriate venues for future years, seeks long-term funding, and develops outreach, public awareness, and publicity. It provides guidance to the Local Organizing Committee on the structure of the Institute, special initiatives, choice of courses to be offered and instructors, and possible funding sources.

Membership
The Advisory Circle consists of a group of no fewer than 12 and no more than 15 members including:

• At least three Institute organizers: the organizer(s) of the previous two Institutes, and the organizer(s) of the upcoming Institute,

• At least four community linguists

• At least two students

• At least two international participants

It is likely that some individuals will fill multiple categories.

The first Advisory Circle is informally constituted, involving those who expressed an interest at the final meeting at the 2010 Institute. Those who have been involved in organization previously (i.e., Santa Barbara and/or Oregon as of winter 2012) will have their terms expire in 2012; those who have not been involved previously will have terms expiring in 2014.

Terms
Terms begin the August following an Institute. They are generally four years (involving organization of two Institutes.)

Determination and selection of members
In the August following each Institute, the outgoing Advisory Circle will determine the number of open slots for the coming term, and through discussion will determine whom to invite as new members. These should be people who (1) have participated in at least one Institute, (2) have demonstrated commitment to the ideals of the institute (inclusivity, collaboration, and the desire to work with others to help preserve the world’s linguistic diversity), and (3) are willing to work as productive members of the Advisory Circle. It is the Advisory Circle’s responsibility to ensure that invitations are extended in such a way to ensure a diversity of representatives (community linguists, academic linguists, students, and at least some range of geographic breadth).

Co-Conveners
After each new Advisory Circle is constituted, Advisory Circle members will select two Co-Conveners for the coming two-year term.

b. Local Organizing Committee
A given year’s Institute is organized and run by a Local Organizing Committee. The committee has the primary responsibility for that Institute. These responsibilities include major fundraising, advertising, all Institute administration including faculty and speaker contracts and payments, arranging IRB approval and dealing with issues of informed consent for the practicum (and elsewhere, if required), arranging venues, travel and visas, and accommodations for all participants, as well as volunteer staffing, airport transfers, social events, evaluation, and follow up reporting, and any other routine things as necessary. Programmatic decisions are made with guidance from the Advisory Committee. The local committee consists of a minimum of two members. One or more external members of the organizing committee might also be appointed, at the discretion of the local committee. In addition, the Local Organizing Committee might ask for others to take on particular organizing roles (e.g., talks, organization of evening and weekend activities, coordination of multi-instructor workshops).

c. Future Institute Selection
Within three months after each institute, the Advisory Circle will solicit expressions of interest in hosting the Institute four years hence (for example, solicit expressions of interest in 2012 for the 2016 Institute). These should take the form of a two-to-three page proposal that (1) presents the qualifications of the proposed Director(s); (2) outlines any Institute-particular themes or approaches; (3) presents possible fundraising strategies, and (4) states the likely available resources for personnel, housing, and classroom and technology support. Over the course of the following months, the Advisory Circle will then work with the proposers to develop a more detailed plan. The final selection should be made no later than January of the following calendar year (for example, no later than January 31st of 2013 for the 2016 Institute).

Posters

https://web.archive.org/web/20150423205556/http://idrh.ku.edu/sites/idrh.drupal.ku.edu/files/files/colang2012/colang-poster/Color-8x11.pdf