Catching up

TalkingAlaska has been quiet for the past few weeks, but there has been lots of activity in the world of Native language. We post a quick summary list of some of these events here, and TalkingAlaska will try to follow up with more information in subsequent postings.

If you know of other recent events we've missed, let us know and we'll follow up in a future post.

• On Sept 13 UAA hosted a panel discussion entitled Revisioning Alaska Native Languages at UAA: A Public Forum on SB 130. The idea was to get people thinking about how to actually implement the new legislation creating the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council and how the university can contribute. You can listen to a podcast of the meeting here (127 min).
• Mike Dunham, a big supporter of Alaska Native languages at the Anchorage Daily News, raised the "Eskimo snow vocabulary" issue again in a September 22 ADN story. Specifically, Dunham suggested that the Yup'ik language by its very nature shows a reluctance to make absolute statements. Linguistic relativity (as this kind of analysis is known) is a fraught subject, with many potential pitfalls. No doubt language does influence how we think. The question is to what degree. There's much that could be said about Dunham's provocative hypothesis, but we'll have to save that for another time.

• On October 9 Alaska Public Radio ran a nice piece on new approaches to teaching and learning indigenous languages. The interview shows how kids are learning Inupiaq and Tlingit using new technologies. There's a transcript and some slides online.

• In related news the University of Alaska Fairbanks was recently awarded a nearly $2 million grant from the US Department of Education for a project entitled Improving Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning. The project, led by Dr. Sabine Siekmann, will train 4 Ph.D. and 20 Masters students in language learning technologies, using a guided collaborative model. Given the clear interest in new technologies and the current resurgence in language revitalization efforts, this project will have a big impact on Native language efforts over the next few years.

• The University of Alaska Anchorage Department of Alaska Native Languages and Studies is hosting a 2-day conference dedicated to "research and activism from all fields related to Alaska Native Studies of the past, present, and future." This will be the first ever Alaska Native Studies Conference. It's called Transforming the University: Alaska Native Studies in the 21st Century. Proposals are due Dec 1, and the conference will take place at UAA on April 5-6, 2013.