The 2019 International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation: Connecting Languages, Communities, and Technology

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

With more than half of the world's 7000 languages currently at risk of disappearing -- at least 170 of them in the United States alone -- there is an urgent need both to create an enduring documentary record of endangered languages and to support teaching and learning of those languages. Technology offers great promise to accelerate both the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages, since tools developed for major languages can in theory be repurposed to support small, endangered languages. However, this promise of technology has yet to yield significant results. Linguists continue to use ad-hoc and antiquated tools, some developed in the 1980's. Apps for language learning are popular but too often have no grounding in research on language acquisition. Additionally, software development proceeds in a top-down fashion, with little input from stakeholders. To address this disconnect, this project will open a dialogue between linguists, language community members, and software developers to forge robust and reliable solutions for supporting language documentation and conservation. This will be done through a series of targeted workshops and roundtable discussions devoted to bringing stakeholders together around various aspects of language technology. The conference will also feature an Exhibitor Fair with the express purpose of connecting language communities to interested software developers, leading to new collaborations and new science that closely aligns with community goals. Broader impacts include the potential to develop new technology tools and language infrastructure for use by both citizen scientists and linguists; the fostering of relationships with industry through the Exhibitor Fair; and the public online availability of the conference presentations. In addition, conference attendees typically include a large number of citizen scientists from historically underrepresented groups in the sciences, such as Native Americans, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, offering opportunities for broadening participation in the language sciences as another broader impact. This project will bring together leading scholars from across the world to explore connections between language and technology as part of the 2019 International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC), hosted by the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Since its inception in 2009, ICLDC has become the flagship venue driving scholarship in the documentation, maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Participants include undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty from linguistics, anthropology, biology, computer science, and other academic disciplines. ICLDC offers its highly diverse audience opportunities for informal science education and training that includes new methodologies and best practices in cutting edge language documentation and that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. A recognized need among linguists is to better integrate and extend these tools as well as develop new ones for data management, and this conference has the potential to increase digital support for the language sciences, for archiving and for open access more generally. In addition, this conference serves as one of the foremost venues for the dissemination of research findings in language documentation and conservation and related disciplines.