I gave a talk on my work in Australia, as a community based linguist and as a researcher, the next day I had a chance to visit some of the classes and talk with more details about different aspects of those two jobs. I am still thinking through many different aspects of it, it would be amazing to see its parallel in Australia.

It was so wonderful to walk around and hear the different languages being spoken, and to hear about what is happening in different communities in the USA.

There was also a visitor there from a company called the ‘Phraselator’, who were selling a small handheld device, meant as a tool for recording Indigenous languages, using voice activation.

The last day I was there there was an excursion with the Tohono O’odham Elders to pick ‘bahidaj’ the fruit of the saguaro (cactus), we walked in the morning sun and used the long ribs of the saguaro tied into poles to push the fruit from the top and catch it in a bucket. There were lizards scuttling about and prickly cactus plants everywhere. The fruit tasted sweet – a bit like fig. It was beautiful!

 We gave a group presentation on collaborative linguistics. What our presentation stressed was the necessity of forming a collaborative partnership between academics and communities in efforts to maintain and revitalize endangered languages.

 Our talk was the last one of the session on the last day of the conference. Now of course, the audience was hardly impressed with the linguists on the team, but the community language activists were literally pummeled with questions after the talk was over.

 One woman asked the language activists something like, “What one aspect of linguistics has been crucial to the development of your project?”  She said she wanted to know because she was interested in teaching linguistics to community activists and would like to know where to start. (I know that she was looking for an answer like, ” Oh it was morphology! Once I understood the morphology and how to break words apart into meaningful units everything else made sense!” I know that she really wanted to hear what part of linguistics was actually useful to people doing language work.)

However, the answer she got form our community language activists was not like this at all. Instead they responded by mentioning how enthusiastic the linguists always were about doing language work (they said something like, ” they keep showing up”), and how much they enjoyed meeting with us, and ultimately how much they trusted us. Later on at the party I heard someone fondly summarize their answer as “Trust and love. What are linguists really good for? Trust and love.”

At first, after hearing this, the academic in me was disappointed. There has to be something from my discipline which is more useful to language revitalization, right? I mean, I’ve been studying linguistics for over 5 years … was it all a waste of time? But then I got to thinking about how many negative things linguists have done throughout history … when it comes down to it, I ought to be overjoyed that there is a community that likes me and thinks I’m a trustworthy academic. In fact, in the end, maybe it’s not so bad to be known for that.

But the question still remains: what are linguists good for? I’m interested now to hear from other community language activists. Is the best thing we have going for us not so much our knowledge of language structure, but rather just our enthusiasm for language, and our willingness to assist in some way?

And what do the linguists think? Did you ever think you would be appreciated merely because you showed up? How does this influence the way you work on language projects?

I’ve been thinking about this issue for a few weeks now and I’d really like to hear from everyone.

It was nice seeing you… in Santa Barbara… next place is Australia!…. right…

“It will aim to promote unity through linguistic diversity. The Assembly called upon States and the Secretariat to work towards the conservation and defence of the world’s languages and requested the Secretariat to appoint a coordinator for multilingualism.

Representatives from several States made contributions. The Andorran representative said, “Protecting languages is one of the fundamental pillars of cultural diversity”.
Meanwhile, there was refreshing news for our Breton, Basque, Occitan and Corsican readers when the representative from France said, “The right to use your own language, the capacity to communicate and, therefore, to understand and be understood, the preservation of an inheritance that dates back centuries or even millennia, should be of prime importance to the United Nations”.
The idea of devoting a whole year to languages was proposed by Austria two years ago at the 33rd UNESCO General Conference held in Paris. (Eurolang 2007).”

This information was copied from here. There is also a press release from the United Nations here.

On the one hand the UN is putting its money where its mouth is and actually implementing its beliefs by making sure that all of the six official languages of the UN  (Spanish, English, Chinese, Arabic, French, and Russian) have all documents and services in these languages, and that linguist diversity is important.

On the other hand they offer very little about the state of indigenous and minority languages of the world explicitly. But I hope putting the idea out there will help get it on governments agendas…

Some other good news is that the:

NATIONAL ALLIANCE TO SAVE NATIVE LANGUAGES

PROUDLY ANNOUNCES

NATIVE LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION NATIONAL SUMMIT

In Washington DC, for more details about this click here.