Event Description
The Global Survey of Language Revitalization Efforts showed that out of 245 surveys collected from around the world, 29% of assets that facilitate the efforts and 45% of needs that hamper them, relate to support (Pérez Báez et al, 2019). Among these, an important type of support is that related to cooperation, including collaborations between language communities and academia. This presentation begins with some of these data as backdrop for examples of collaborations. The first example is efforts to document the lexicon of Diidxazá (zai, Otomanguean), which include the publication of a specialized ethnobotanical dictionary (Pérez Báez et al 2019). The second is the long-standing National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages, which has now served 141 tribal representatives from 65 language communities (Baldwin et al 2018). The third is the recent launch of Living Languages-Lenguas Vivas-Línguas Vivas, the first international, multilingual journal dedicated to topics in language revitalization and sustainability. The journal has developed a novel structure for publication and peer-review that is inclusive of revitalization practitioners who are not in academia (Amaral et al 2022). While these projects are rather different from each other — documentation, capacity building and dissemination — they illustrate how academia can evolve to increase inclusion and collaboration in support of language revitalization.
Speaker
Gabriela Pérez Báez is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Oregon, the director of the university’s Language Revitalization Lab, and a co-director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages. Her research centers on Indigenous language revitalization, especially concerned with the Zapotec communities in her native Mexico. Her contributions to the field are wide-ranging, including publications on syntax and semantics, language and cognition, migration and language vitality, and two dictionaries of Isthmus Zapotec. Recently, Pérez Báez collaborated in the launch of Living Languages, an international, multilingual journal dedicated to language revitalization.
Cosponsors
Presented by the Language Revitalization Working Group and cosponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies.