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1. 'Ilittibaatoksali ''We are working together': Perspectives on Our Chickasaw Tribal-Academic Collaboration

   Fitzgerald, Colleen M; Hinson, Joshua D (October 2013, FEL XVII: Endangered Languages Beyond Boundaries: Community Connections, Collaborative Approaches, and Cross-Disciplinary Research)

   Here we present research resulting from a tribal-academic collaboration between the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program (CLRP) and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). This collaboration began three years ago, with a UTA service-learning trip to Ada, Oklahoma. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program is vigorously engaged in many activities to support language use by the remaining 70 or so fluent speakers. Communities facing such stark endangerment must address revitalization and documentation simultaneously, and in a way that maximizes resources. Our partnership addresses this challenge. This paper draws on the principles of Community-Based Language Research, defined in Czaykowska-Higgins (2009: 24) as a model that “not only allows for the production of knowledge on a language, but also assumes that that knowledge can and should be constructed for, with, and by community members, and that it is therefore not merely (or primarily) for or by linguists.” Benefitting from an action-research model, our collaboration supports the Chickasaw community by developing revitalization-driven documentation and training materials for learners that both feed into and are drawn from documentation. Both sides of our collaboration are committed to the transfer of knowledge, especially sharing our findings and knowledge with other endangered language communities. 

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2. Building a Community of Scholarship in Language Documentation

   Hildebrandt, Kristine; Sapién, Racquel-María (March 2025, University of Hawaii)

   Building a Community of Scholarship in Language Documentation The effort to re-center “community” in language documentation and conservation also must include efforts by scholars and community leaders from different backgrounds and perspectives to better communicate and better understand each other’s approaches and needs. This presentation charts the efforts and lessons learned from a two-year collaborative, or “convergence” initiative, between approximately 45 language documentation scholars and diverse stakeholders, including academics from other disciplines and indigenous community members. This initiative aims to define, exemplify, and promote meaningful, and impactful cross-disciplinary language documentation scholarship informed by the positions, experiences, frameworks, and methodologies central to other fields and communities beyond what has been described as the “WEIRD” canon (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, as covered in Kupferschmidt, 2019). Our initiative’s position is that language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization project developers and collaborators benefit from dialogues generating concrete examples, and from interaction with people from different backgrounds in areas with potential overlap, including scholarship in anthropology, environmental and political sciences, curriculum and education, and sociology. The initiative has included several in-person and online plenary presentations about convergence research, including potentials and problems, as well as recurring smaller themed sub-group (virtual) conversations. We identified five themed areas of focus for these conversations: “language and well-being”, “language and education/revitalization/reclamation”, “language and land”, “language and community”, and “language and institutions”. This presentation focuses on the work of last three groups, as those discussants covered several topics of relevance to ICLDC participants, including: • Language and Community: Case studies of community-centered methods/viewpoints and indigenous sovereignty in collaborative research • Language and Land: New research questions including deeper language-land connections; ethical considerations of data sharing and centering community needs in documentation project design and goals • Language and Institutions: Advocating for changes within federal funding agencies at multiple levels, from the framing of solicitations to program-wide infrastructure changes; illustrating types of research that are possible with different types of funding (e.g., non-profit, state, federal). This includes lobbying funding agencies to instill better communication with and support for proposals submitted by indigenous scholars The presentation also includes next steps for this initiative and opportunities for other interested stakeholders to become involved. Reference Kupferschmidt, Kai. 2019. Psychologist aims to study diverse minds, not WEIRDos, Science 365: 110. 

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3. Community and Collaboration in Undergraduate Language Documentation Research

   Hildebrandt, Kristine (March 2026, Georgetown University Roundtable on Linguistics)

   ‘Community’ and ‘Collaboration’ in Undergraduate Language Documentation Research: A Case Study from Nepal and a U.S. University A typical image of endangered language documentation is that of the “lone-ranger” scholar, devoting years to singlehandedly describing, analyzing, and preserving a vulnerable language, and taking sole credit for these efforts. However, this “single scholar” model is changing now, with the rise of team-structure documentation projects and with community-oriented materials designed by faculty, students and community collaborators. As ethical as these new methods may be, they can be challenging to realize in a shifting higher education environment, for example in a university or program where undergraduate teaching is emphasized and recognized before or in place of scholarly achievements. I propose to present on my experiences in providing informal learning opportunities for undergraduate students from different disciplines to engage in peer-like research collaborations, including experience with the digital humanities. I will illustrate my work with undergraduate students as we collaboratively built interactive, multi-media digital archives of narratives recorded from speakers of under-resourced languages from Nepal, which is now housed for free public access at the University of Virginia (UVA). Students received stipends, either through my funded projects, or via my university’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities office to collaboratively edit narratives in ELAN, an audio-video annotation and translation program. They also uploaded videos and transcripts to the UVA archive and added meta-data and subject keywords for searchability in the library’s database. Students learned best practices for archiving born-digital materials, and we also discussed the ethics of data sovereignty and issues that may arise in the archiving of materials that are not from our own personal experiences and communities. 

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4. Sociolinguistics and language shift: toward understanding the processes of shift through the prism of speakers

   https://doi.org/10.37892/2713-2951  

   Lenore Grenoble (January 2021, Sociolingvistika)

   The study of language shift, the replacement of one language by another in a community, or subgroup of a speech community, is a prime topic for sociolinguistic analysis: shift is almost always the result of social factors. This paper argues for focusing research on the study of shift in process and, to that end, studying the different kinds of speakers in shifting communities. The prevalent response to massive, global language shift by linguists is language documentation. Although the need for documentation is clear, there have been inadvertent consequences: valorizing last speakers, promoting linguistic purism, and devaluing L2 language learners who, in many communities, represent the future of the language. The urgency of documenting and describing languages with relatively small numbers of elderly speakers has led the linguistic community to focus almost exclusively on such groups and ignore both larger speech communities in earlier stages of shift, and overlook the wide range of speaker types in shift communities. From a social standpoint, the result is that we are often failing to do the language work in precisely those communities where reversing language shift is still relatively easy. From a scientific standpoint, we are missing the opportunity to study language change in process, and missing the chance to study speaker variation in a shift situation. Variation in proficiency and performance across shifting speakers is not random but systematic and correlates with a set of social and cognitive factors. 

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5. Motivating the Documentation of the Verbal Arts: Arguments from Theory and Practice

   Fitzgerald, Colleen M (March 2017, Language documentation and conservation)

   For language documentation to be sufficiently extensive to cover a given com- munity’s language practices (cf. Himmelmann 1998), then including verbal arts is essential to ensure the richness of that comprehensive record. The verbal arts span the creative and artistic uses of a given language by speakers, such as storytelling, songs, puns and poetry. In this paper, I demonstrate the significance of verbal arts documentation in three other ways. Drawing from Indigenous language community contexts in the United States, I describe how the verbal arts are relevant to linguistic theory, revitalization and training. First, the influence by verbal arts on phonological theory is attested, affirming that the collection and analysis of verbal arts data plays a significant role in the phonological analysis of a given language and in theories of phonology. Second, the verbal arts generate extremely useful examples in training models for language work, since such examples can be used to cultivate phonological awareness in learners and teachers. Third, the verbal arts provide culturally meaningful materials for language revitalization. 

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