How We are Staying Resilient during the Coronavirus Pandemic

We hope you are all staying safe and practicing social distancing to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, wherever you may be. Here are some ways that we are attempting to stay resilient during this time of change and upheaval. This advice may be useful for those in the broader language documentation community:

We are checking in on community collaborators, speakers and colleagues to make sure everyone is doing well. In particular, many of the speakers of endangered languages we work with are elderly and/or vulnerable health-wise, and we want to make sure they are alright. If you have worked with any aging speakers on your language projects, be sure to reach out to them and talk to them over the phone or via video chat.

Stay resilient: tips from Living Tongues

We are a fully remote organization, so thankfully all of our researchers and colleagues are used to collaborating together from afar. We have a regular schedule of Zoom calls to keep everyone informed and up to date on all the projects happening. Also, for some projects, we are moving towards collaborating with speakers at a distance and reviewing linguistic data with them through Google Docs.
Things are changing fast, so we try to stay calm by taking things one day at a time. Many of our upcoming conferences, events and travel plans have been cancelled or postponed. So we are focusing on processing the hundreds of hours of raw data that we have recently recorded during fieldwork sessions in India and other locations.
In the coming days and weeks, we will be publishing posts about where and how you can learn endangered and minority languages online! We have been taking a deep dive in recent weeks, reviewing the many online apps and language-learning platforms available out there, and we will be sharing those results with you. We understand that it may not be feasible for people to learn languages online at this time, but for those of you who can and are interested, we will provide you with as much information as possible.

Thanks for reading! Take care.