Here’s Robbie Penman’s update from the fall of 2017, a few months after his summer with WAYK on St. Paul Island, Alaska. Thanks for the update, Robbie! *Jerky is one of the few Quechua words in English At the end of August 2017, I came back to the Ununited Kingdom (note to Susanna: that’s deliberate!)… Read more »
In my last blog, I wrote about the obstacles to maintaining an immersion bubble. In this blog, I ask how the immersion bubble, as a kind of “language policy”, can further the interests of an Indigenous language community. There are two related benefits to immersion bubbles, as I see it. One benefit is that they… Read more »
The idea of creating an “immersion bubble” is probably nothing new in language learning. Nor is it new within the field of language revitalization in the 20th and 21st centuries; creating immersion bubbles has been a goal of many revitalization movements at least since the kōhanga reo pre-school immersion initiatives in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the… Read more »
Read Myles’ first post about linguistic terminology here. Working in the field of linguistics over the last few years, I have noticed some divisions in terminology that I would like to highlight in this blog. As North American linguistics begins to turns away from its roots in “salvage linguistics” and more towards collaborative community-based research,… Read more »
The 5th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC), “Vital Voices: Linking Language & Wellbeing,” will be held March 2-5, 2017, at the Hawaiʻi Imin International Conference Center on the campus of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. The 5th ICLDC is hosted by the Department of Linguistics and the National Foreign Language Resource… Read more »
What does it mean to revitalize a language? What does it mean to secure its existence for the next generation of speakers? What does this look like and why is it important? As a Native person who is deeply concerned about the future of my heritage language, Tewa, these are the types of questions I… Read more »
We are pleased to share a gorgeous new video by Sky Hopinka, WAYK team member and a truly stellar filmmaker. Sky’s film is about how classroom teachers can strengthen one of the most misunderstood endangered languages…Latin. In July 2014, Sky traveled with WAYK to West Virginia to document the second annual Pedagogy Rusticatio, a program… Read more »
[vimeo=19905263] Here’s the second video in our Irish Language series. Start with the first one. In order to take advantage of videos like this, you’ll need to have mastered the WAYK tutorial or played a WAYK game before. It’s worth noting that, as always, we are applying tq mumble to leading a game in Irish… Read more »
[vimeo=19896067] For anyone who has either been to a WAYK workshop, language night, or mastered the WAYK tutorial, you can copy-cat along with this video and learn some Irish language, known in America as Irish Gaelic, and in Ireland as Irish or Gaeilge. You may note that we haven’t completely made up our mind… Read more »
Thank you to everyone playing WAYK, and for getting the word out about the Fluency Revolution. Please keep it up – we’re making progress, but aren’t quite there yet. We’re realizing that the greatest obstacle to our mission at this time is funding. We believe that once we’re fully funded, we can help communities turn… Read more »
I’d like to say I’ve gotten better at not panicking when I hear of a language struggling. While mostly true, I still have a reaction – it now just feels like a dull ache in my gut, and a fluttering of my heart. It’s an odd feeling we have here, on the WAYK team, especially… Read more »
WAYK Podcast, Episode 5: Revitalizing Chinuk Wawa, Part 2. 32 minutes and 18 seconds. [direct download] [Note: Chinuk Wawa is a very endangered indigenous language native to the Pacific Northwest. Please keep in mind that we make no attempt to teach anyone to speak Chinuk Wawa by podcasting about our Chinuk nights, and during the… Read more »
WAYK Podcast, Episode 4: Revitalizing Chinuk Wawa. 39 minutes and 41 seconds. [direct download] [Note: Chinuk Wawa is a very endangered indigenous language native to the Pacific Northwest. Please keep in mind that we make no attempt to teach anyone to speak Chinuk Wawa by podcasting about our Chinuk nights, and during the podcast we… Read more »
Language revitalization doesn’t happen once; it signifies a necessary and continual process throughout the life of a language. Revitalization happens every time a new person learns the language, every time a child becomes an adult and attains a “Superior” proficiency. Language and culture must constantly internally expand and renew, in order to account for the… Read more »
We now live in a time where, in the next 5-10 years, we will see a massive die-off of language diversity as globalization and modern forces have their final impacts among aging speakers of the world’s traditional, wisdom-bearing, indigenous languages. Unless we act now. In this article, following forward from the triage of a… Read more »
In the past month, two critical members of the Hupacasath First Nation died; they numbered among the last who spoke the language native to Vancouver island fluently from childhood. Hupacasath speaker Dorothy Unger died Nov. 21 and Edward Tatoosh died more recently in December. This caused a triple tragedy; the loss felt by their families,… Read more »
