Newsletter: Highlights from 2018 and end-of-year support

Looking back on 2018…

As we look back on 2018, we’d like to thank all of the researchers and community collaborators who work with us day-to-day on documentation programs and digital projects underway around the world! Our work is detail-oriented and grueling, and despite the challenges that we face, as well as the ongoing threat of language extinction, we continue to move forward with perseverance and enthusiasm.

Want to support our work with an end-of-year donation? Make a gift

Some highlights from 2018

In August 2018, Living Tongues Director Dr. Greg Anderson was one of the keynote speakers at the 19th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, which took place in Central Asia for the first time, at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. The event included a workshop on “Documentation of Endangered Turkic Languages of Siberia.”

Living Tongues researcher Opino Gomango (right) gave a talk about Sora noun incorporation at the 40th International Conference of the Linguistic Society of India (Dec 2018).

Living Tongues Program Director Anna Luisa Daigneault (center) gave a talk about endangered languages in North America at Roanoke College (Dec 2018).

Publications

Our work can be found in this newly published collection of articles from the Seventh International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics, held in 2017 in Kiel, Germany. The papers present significant advances in both diachronic and synchronic studies of Austroasiatic languages in Mainland Southeast Asia and Eastern India.

Living Tongues linguists Dr. Greg Anderson and Dr. Bikram Jora have a joint paper in this excellent publication, and Dr. Anderson has a paper with Dr. Hiram Ring in this as well. These findings are the result of many years of hard work, and we are grateful for the support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities that have allowed us to continue this work over the years.

Fieldwork

With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. K. David Harrison has been working alongside the New York Botanical Garden on a project entitled “Collaborative Research: Plant, Fungal and Linguistic Diversity of Tafea Province, Vanuatu.” Since 2016, the team has been busily documenting ethnobotanical and linguistic data from eight Vanuatu language communities, including the Nafe language. The team has been storing the collection in new Talking Dictionaries accessible to the public.

Dr. Mark Donohue (Living Tongues Senior Director, Asia-Pacific Region) conducted fieldwork on the Jiamao language this year. Above, Mark is recording basic vocabulary from Huang Tingke in Jiamao village, Hainan, China (July 2018).

Mark Donohue (right) and Dongmei Feng (center), from Hainan Normal University, investigating the Tunchang dialect of Hainan, China (July 2018).

Thank you!

A huge thank you to our field research team in India: Bikram Jora, Opino Gomango and Luke Horo. All of their hard work, dedication and insight continue to make documenting the Munda language family possible. Thank you to Gutob speakers Bondu Kirsani, Tankadhar Sisa, Kamla Sisa and Radha Kirsani, as well as field assistants Gajendra Pradhan, Sujesh Gomango and Satosh Padni for their great work on the recent Gutob language documentation project, which was funded by grant award number 1500092 from the National Science Foundation (“Documentation of Gutob, an endangered Munda language of India”). The NSF’s support is gratefully acknowledged.

We’d like to give a shout-out to our colleagues in Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, China, Russia, Nigeria, Chile and Peru who we have collaborated with in person and afar on various documentation projects, workshops and events this year. Thank you to our US-based colleagues such as Jacob Bowdoin for working on the new mobile-friendly Talking Dictionary app (coming in 2019!), and to intern Jessica Golden from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for working on the Munda Languages Initiative web page and the Talking Dictionaries Map.

THANK YOU to all of our amazing online volunteers who have helped with digital tasks such as transcription and research: Katie Li, Shelby Sands, Murilo da Silva Barros, Henry Wu, Hannah Bishop, Michael Horlick, Dylan Charter, Dave Prine, Theresa Usuriello, Juhyae Kim, Edward Hess, Amatullah Brown, Zainah Asfoor, Gillian Gardiner, Virginia Vázquez, Sarah Agou, Charis Nandor, Corinne Van Ryckeghem, Leena Dihingia, Thorin Engeseth, Priyanka Pradeepkumar, Wojciech Zeyland, Jacquelyn Duffy, Vasiliki Moutzouri, Durgesh Rajan, Andrea Macanovic, Anna Peckham, Charlie Baranski, Cheyenne Wing, Kevin Sanders, Pranav Merchant, Li-Fang Lai. Thanks to the people and organizations who we have collaborated with on various events and campaigns this year: Nick Montgomery at Roanoke College, Eddie Avila at Rising Voices, the team at Portland State University, Boise State, and countless other people we worked with at conferences and workshops all around the world.

Also, we’d like to say thank you to our generous donors who continue to support our work: Kamal El-Wattar, the Carpers and many others. Thanks to the Zegar Foundation for funding our current major project documenting the fragile knowledge domains of the Birhor people in India.

Shout-out to one of our amazing volunteers, Dave Prine, who worked on the Gutob language project with us this year. He sported his Living Tongues tote bag at this year’s Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava, Slovakia. He also made a T-shirt with phrases in Gutob. Awesome!

2019

Stay tuned for updates on 2019, UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages. We are planning an art exhibit as well as a campaign to raise awareness about endangered languages.

Wishing you an excellent holiday season!

– the Living Tongues team