for an evening of music, dance, poetry, food and drink in support of endangered languages at home and abroad!

We will be presenting some of our recent work and updating everyone on what’s to come.

(sliding scale entrance – pay what you can)

We Still Live Here (Âs Natayuneân)

Anne Makepeace

2010 · 56 min · United States

Filmmaker in Person · New York Festival Premiere

Saturday · November 12 · 3:30 PM · Kaufmann Theater

Hyannis. Narragansett. Sippewisset. Shawmut. Chappaquiddick. Algonquin. These names litter the signposts of New England and are spoken with little thought to their origins. For Native Americans, these words are all that remain of languages that once rang out across the Massachusetts seaboard. Anne Makepeace, director of Coming to Light (2000) about Edward S. Curtis’s photography of western tribes, follows Martha’s Vineyard islander Jesse Littledoe Baird, who was called by a vision to return the Wampanoag language to its people. Baird reconstructs it using the only tools available, a Bible translated into Wampanoag by the British missionary John Eliot and official deeds, letters, and petitions of the colonial era, which form a collective history of how the tribe’s land and culture were stolen in the first place. Laced with evocative silhouette animation, We Still Live Here shows how the Wampanoag people have resurrected a part of their culture with the very devices once used to defeat it.

Trailer Link

http://www.makepeaceproductions.com/video-wamp

Ticket Link

SUMMER ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING

You are invited to ELA’s second annual Summer meeting

Learn about our summer projects and how you can get involved!

All languages welcome!

Spread culture!

Tell your story!

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

3:00-5:00 PM

at the Bowery Poetry Club 308 Bowery (Between Houston and Bleecker)

New York City

http://www.bowerypoetry.com

This workshop is free and open to the public, although Daniel’s particular fondness for any of the following should not be taken personally:

i) anyone with an interest in linguistics and in conserving their own language or that of others;

ii) descriptively oriented linguists interested in systematically studying an unfamiliar language;

iii) and theoretically oriented linguists interested in providing a better documented verifiable basis for their claims.

In past sessions, topics have included:

- what is an endangered language? what is language documentation?

- how to structure a documentation project and manage data

- which technical tools are appropriate and how to use them

- good and evil formats and encoding (language documentation can get pretty serious)

- ethical considerations when conducting fieldwork

Things will be heating up next Thursday (March 3rd) when students begin to lead elicitations with Seydou, a speaker of Songhai.

Note that next Thursday’s session will be from 5:30 to 7:30pm.
For more information, write to info[at]endangeredlanguagealliance.org.

-  Bien

First of all, allow us to wish all of you the Happiest of Gregorian (not to mention Julian) New Years! We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your continued support as well as to give all of you a very brief summary of what we have accomplished this 2010 and where we hope to go in 2011.

The first major landmarks for us in 2010 were our official incorporation as a 501c3 non-profit organization and the New York Times article which highlighted our work. While the former allowed us to take our operation to a new level, the latter brought our work to the public eye and showed us just how many people there are out there with a similar passion for maintaining and understanding linguistic diversity. Although we only had a very short time to organize our general meetings over the summer, we felt they were successful in bringing together a fantastic range of people interested in our mission. It was the first step in forming a real grassroots initiative to address language endangerment in New York City.

We hope to make our language survey a regular summer activity and look forward to taking to the streets again with all of you this summer. With more time for us to consider the complex logistics, I’m sure this year’s program will be even more fruitful than the last.

In terms of organization, it must be said that we are learning as we go. One of our foremost new year’s resolutions is to improve the line of communication between us and all those interested in participating in our projects so we can be more efficient in placing volunteers. Sincerest apologies to all of you whom we have not been able to respond to as quickly as we wanted to. On a positive note – inefficiencies notwithstanding – we were able to initiate many new projects thanks to the enthusiasm of our new volunteers. As it now stands, we have regular meetings for the following language groups: Amuzgo, Mahongwe/Kota, Mamuju, Garifuna, Neo-Aramaic, Kabardian and Ossetian. We also hope to soon begin a new group for Shughni/Roshani this month or next. Some of these groups are focused on grammatical description while others are aimed at the creation of pedagogical materials. You are all invited to participate in these weekly sessions. Just contact Bien at coordinator[at]endangeredlanguagealliance.org for the schedule and more information.

2010 also brought us good luck in the form of grant support for several in-situ projects. Baitz Niahossa will carry out work on Tsou in Taiwan with support from the Alice Cozzi Heritage Language Foundation, and Natalia Bermudez has recently left for Panama, where, with the support of the Gesellscahft für Bedrohte Sprache, she will begin fieldwork on Naso (aka Teribe), an endangered Chibchan language.

Finally, some upcoming events:

The CUNY Conference on the Phonology of Endangered Languages will take place January 12 – 14, 2011 at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. The goal of the conference is to learn whatever we can from the sound patterns of languages that are endangered or threatened, with a special emphasis on understudied languages. For more information, see: http://cunyphonologyforum.net/endan.php

Daniel Kaufman will be holding a weekly workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center which is free and open to all. It will cover language documentation and description and will meet Thursdays 5:00-7:00 pm. Please email info[at]endangeredlanguagealliance.org for more details.

Best wishes to all of you for 2011…onwards and upwards!

ELA Co-Directors Daniel Kaufman, Juliette Blevins & Bob Holman

Date and Time: Monday, October 4th, 2010, 6:30-8:30pm – CUNY Graduate Center on 365 Fifth Avenue between 34th and 35th street, Room 9207

Archiving for the future, today: the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS

David Nathan
ELAR, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Language documentations and the archives that hold them are valuable sources
of linguistic research data. In the future, these archives will also become crucial
vectors of transmission for many endangered and extinct languages. Thus the theory
and practice of documentation and the capabilities of archives will play key roles
in the futures of many human languages. Today, documentary linguistics needs an
evaluative and critical discourse about its practices and outcomes. Researchers have
been struggling to go beyond conceiving of documentations as collections of data
files. One route forward is through consideration of documentation’s audiences and
usages, to reach better understandings of the forms of documentation and what it
means to publish them.

Just as documentary linguistics has found an ethical and community-oriented footing
(Austin 2010), archives must also function as ethical publishers of this component of
human heritage. The ELAR archive at SOAS has taken a social networking approach
in order to address two major characteristics of endangered languages documentation:
the sensitivity of many such materials (Thieberger & Musgrave 2007), requiring
effective but nuanced access control; and the fluidity of the materials and their access
conditions over time, requiring multiple ongoing relationships between depositors,
users, and the archive (Nathan, in press). Tomorrow’s digital language archiving
is not about technology but about relationships. Management of non-preservation
functions is largely handed over to depositors and users, and the archive becomes
redefined as a forum for building and conducting relationships and exchanges among
them.

In this talk, I will outline and demonstrate ELAR’s approach to these issues.

References

Austin, Peter K. 2010. Current Issues in Language Documentation. In Peter K. Austin
(ed.) Language Documentation and Description, Volume 7:12-33. London: SOAS.

David Nathan (in press) Archives 2.0 for Endangered Languages: from Disk Space
to MySpace. In International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. Edinburgh
University Press. 2010.

Thieberger, Nicholas & Simon Musgrave. 2007. Documentary linguistics and ethical
issues. In Peter K. Austin (ed) Language Documentation and Description, Volume 4. 26-
37.

After some general strategizing we moved on to our plans for the second part of the project, in which we will be working with selected speakers to record their language. The survey is slated to continue into the summer but volunteers will soon be able to set up their own recording sessions. We will begin gently, by first recording Swadesh lists and other vocabulary items and only then slowly moving on to more complex tasks. Swadesh lists in various languages, as well as new multi-lingual flyers and other materials distributed in this meeting, are available here. When people get weary of recording words, we will move on to recording phrases and basic greetings. By mid-August I am hoping we can begin recording longer texts.

We have some volunteers who will be helping out with the technicalities of recording. For those who are interested in learning how to make good recordings and practicing with the new digital recorders, there is a session tentatively being set up for next week, June 29th with Nina. More info to follow soon.

As many of you know, my guidance, for what it’s worth, will have to be administered long-distance for the next several weeks as I already had immutable plans to be in Indonesia and the Philippines before this summer project materialized. But fear not, I am anticipating having regular access to email for most of the trip and will do my best to respond to all questions and issues as they arise. Juliette will be in charge of the office and will be answering the office phone so there should be no disruptions in service, as they say.

And finally, just in case anybody cares, I plan to post some sights and sounds from my fieldwork here on the ELA site. I would even call it a blog if I didn’t have issues with that word.

All the best,

Daniel

Same place, same time (different day) –

The Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery between Bleecker and Houston)

Saturday June 19th, 2:00-3:30 PM

We will be discussing survey progress and

Phase II, the language documentation phase!

We are now well on our way to organizing for the language survey. More details and materials from the meeting can be found here.

Invitation

Endangered Language Alliance

First Town Meeting

Learn more about the Alliance and New York's endangered languages

Find a place in one of our new documentation projects!