This summer, the WAYK team, including new WAYK interns, will live in the Vancouver area and work with a team of local speakers and learners. The team that comes together in North Vancouver will build on the existing work done over the past several years (including experiences working with both Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and hen̓q̓əmin̓em̓). Over the… Read more »
Here’s Robbie Penman’s update from the spring of 2018, several months after his summer with WAYK on St. Paul Island, Alaska. Thanks for the update, Robbie! In April, me and Caoife left Melipüllü, a.k.a. Puerto Montt (I’d been there for about three months, helping the local language revitalization team) for Argentina. We took a bit… Read more »
January 7, 2019 – March 29, 2019 The WAYK team returns to Tsleil-Waututh Nation in North Vancouver, BC for 12 weeks in the winter of 2019 to partner with the TWN language department, Kwi Awt Stelmexw, and the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh adult immersion program at Simon Fraser University.
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 »
We’ve put together a list of some of the most common questions we get about WAYK internships and Summer Language Intensive projects. We hope that anyone who’s interested in applying for an internship with WAYK can find the answer to some of their burning questions below. If you have a question that’s not answered, please… Read more »
This summer, we are once again fortunate to offer WAYK internship opportunities during the 2019 Summer Language Intensive. The internship positions are sponsored by our host community, Tsleil-Waututh Nation, in North Vancouver, BC. Participating in a WAYK summer project is one of the best ways to be fully immersed in the work of language revitalization,… Read more »
WAYK is very excited to announce—after months (and years!) of planning with the host community—that our 2019 Summer Intensive will take place in North Vancouver, British Columbia! This will be WAYK’s 9th summer project with a partner community. In 2019, we will continue our partnership with Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN). Due to the location and history… 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 »
September 18, 2018-October 12, 2018 November 5, 2018-December 7, 2018 The WAYK team returns to Tsleil-Waututh Nation in North Vancouver, BC for 9 weeks in the fall of 2018 to partner with the TWN language department, Kwi Awt Stelmexw, and the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh adult immersion program at Simon Fraser University.
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 »
September 18, 2018-October 12, 2018 November 5, 2018-December 7, 2018 The WAYK team returns to Tsleil-Waututh Nation in North Vancouver, BC for 9 weeks in the fall of 2018 to partner with the TWN language department, Kwi Awt Stelmexw, and the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh adult immersion program at Simon Fraser University.
We are happy to share the first episode of season one of the WAYKcast, a new podcast from WAYK about language revitalization, language learning, and Where Are Your Keys. In each episode, Sky Hopinka will talk with members of the WAYK team and the wider WAYK community. Episodes will focus on broad and focused questions… Read more »
This summer, the WAYK team, including 4 WAYK interns, will live in Anchorage and work with a team of local and regional speakers and youth from both Eastern and Western speaking communities. The team that comes together in Anchorage will build on the work done since 2015 in St. Paul Island and Atka and will focus… Read more »
This summer, we are once again fortunate to offer internship opportunities during the 2018 WAYK Summer Intensive. The internship positions are sponsored by our host community (APIA), in partnership with TAC, TAF, and a number of other regional organizations. Participating in a WAYK summer project is one of the best ways to be fully immersed… Read more »
The WAYK team returns to Tsleil-Waututh Nation in North Vancouver, BC for 10 weeks in the winter/spring of 2018 to partner with the TWN language department in their work with the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language.
As part of the Summer Language Intensive we took part in an excellent training in archiving practices (see Rachel Sprouse and Talia London’s blogs for more info). During this training, the local team decided on how to label the items in their archive; in other words, what “metadata” to attach to the items. My attention… Read more »
I have been thinking about the relationship between a language learner and an “informant”, who may be a native speaker, a fluent speaker, or just someone more proficient than the learner. Here on St. Paul Island, local language team members have been improving their fluency by “language hunting” with some of the elders who either… Read more »
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been learning how to “hunt” language. When I first heard what people meant by “hunt” in WAYK-speak, I wondered: is this what I learnt to call “elicitation” in my classes on linguistic field methods at SOAS (my alma mater)? I’ve decided that the answer is: not exactly, but… Read more »
Why do we “hunt” language? I asked Evan why we use “hunting” as a primary metaphor for the Where Are Your Keys approach to language learning. We use the word a lot, and it’s a pretty loaded term (pun intended). In WAYK, language hunting is an activity that you do as a learner with a… Read more »
