In Memoriam: Wallace (Wally) Chafe

It is with great sadness that the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, announces the passing of our dear friend and colleague Professor Wallace (Wally) Chafe, at the age of 91, on February 3, 2019. An exceptionally deep-thinking and broad-ranging scholar, Professor Chafe produced over 230 books, articles, and other publications on semantics, discourse, prosody, cognition, and Native American languages which have been foundational to functional and usage-based approaches to linguistics.

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CFP: Community-based language research across the Americas

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CBLRAA 2019 is a workshop organized in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA). The goal of the workshop is to promote and proliferate strategies for documenting and revitalizing American indigenous languages by finding ways to improve communication among community members, researchers, and institutions who engage in community-based language work. At the workshop we will discuss differences and similarities among the community-based approaches being applied, ethical and practical issues that arise, what we can learn from one another, and how we can maintain channels of communication and collaboration in the future.

Call for Papers: 50th Algonquian Conference / Le 50e Congrès des Algonquinistes

Deadline: September 05, 2018

(La version française apparaît ci-dessous.)

The 50th Algonquian Conference will be held in Edmonton at the University of Alberta, from Thursday, October 25 to Sunday October 28, 2018.

Visit the conference page here.

The conference is co-organized by the University of Alberta, the University of Lethbridge, the First Nations University of Canada, and the Maskwacîs Education and Schools Commission.

This conference is an international meeting for indigenous and non-indigenous scholars and community members to share research relating to Algonquian peoples, the largest First Peoples group in Canada. Fields of interest include anthropology, archaeology, art, biography, education, ethnography, ethnobotany, folklore, geography, history, language education, linguistics, literature, music, indigenous studies, political science, psychology, religion and sociology.

The Conference will open on the evening of Thursday, October 25 with a welcome reception. Regular conference sessions will take place from Friday morning to Sunday noon.

If you are interested in making a presentation, please send a title and abstract of maximum 300 words to the following address: alg50@ualberta.ca.

The subject line of your e-mail must read “Algonquian Conference” and the text of your e-mail message must include your name, postal address, institutional and/ or tribal affiliation and telephone number as well as the e-mail address of each speaker.

Please indicate your requirements for audio-visual equipment. The deadline for submission of abstracts is September 5, 2018.

Le 50e Congrès annuel des Algonquinistes aura lieu à l’Université de l’Alberta du jeudi 25 octobre au dimanche 28e octobre 2010.

Le congrès est co-organisé par l’Université de l’Alberta, l’Université de Lethbridge, First Nations University of Canada et Maskwacîs Education and Schools Commission.

Ce congrès réunit les chercheurs et chercheuses autochtones et non-autochtones de plusieurs pays et de divers horizons disciplinaires qui s’intéressent aux populations algonquiennes, lesquelles constituent le groupe autochtone le plus nombreux au Canada. Les domaines comprennent l’anthropologie, l’archéologie, les arts, l’éducation, l’ethnographie, l’ethnobotanique, le folklore, la géographie, l’histoire, les langues et l’éducation, la linguistique, la littérature, la musique, les études autochtones, les sciences politiques, la psychologie, la religion et la sociologie.

Le Congrès débutera le jeudi 25 octobre en soirée avec un cocktail de bienvenue. Les communications commenceront le vendredi dans la matinée et se poursuivront jusqu’au dimanche midi.

Les personnes qui souhaitent faire une présentation sont priées d’envoyer un titre et un résumé d’au plus une page à l’adresse suivante: alg50@ualberta.ca.

L’en-tête de votre message courriel doit porter la mention CONGRÈS DES ALGONQUINISTES. Le texte de votre message doit inclure toutes vos coordonnées: nom, institution ou affiliation tribale, ainsi que les adresses électroniques de tous les coprésentateurs.

N’oubliez pas de nous faire part de vos besoins en termes d’appareils audio-visuels et électroniques. La date limite de soumission des résumés est le 5 septembre 2018.

Call for Papers: The phonetic structures of Indigenous languages of South America

The 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 19) will take place in Melbourne, Australia on 5-9 August 2019, with “Endangered Languages” as one of the themes of the conference.  We are delighted to announce that there will be a special session at the Congress devoted to the phonetic structures of Indigenous languages of South America.  We are now inviting full paper submissions on original, unpublished research relating to the phonetics of any Indigenous South American language.  The special session will be a poster session, but all successful submissions will be immediately published as part of the prestigious ICPhS proceedings.

This special session is a venue for researchers to present the most up-to-date phonetic research on endangered South American Indigenous languages. In particular, the session focuses on how researching phonetic structures in native South American languages can inform and enrich phonetic typology as a whole. Furthermore, this session offers a possibility for field phoneticians working on endangered languages to exchange methodological insights given that mainstream practices for collecting phonetic data may not be possible in the small remote communities where many endangered languages are spoken.

Authors are requested to first send an e-mail to the organisers of the special session (m.kohlberger@hum.leidenuniv.nl; lorena.orjuela@utexas.edu), indicating their intention to submit.  In order to formally submit a paper, authors must go through the general submission process for ICPhS 19 (https://www.icphs2019.org/call-for-papers/).  Upon submission, authors will have to indicate that they wish to take part in the special session “The phonetic structures of Indigenous languages of South America”.  All submissions will go through a double-blind review process.  The deadline for submission is 4 December 2018, and authors will be notified of decisions regarding acceptance by 15 February 2019.

Submissions need to conform to a strict format.  Papers can only be a maximum of four A4 pages long, with an additional page for reference.  Further details about format, including Word and LaTeX templates, can be found on the ICPhS 19 website (https://www.icphs2019.org/call-for-papers/).

Students and early career researchers can apply for awards towards travel costs through ASSTA (http://www.assta.org/?q=assta-conference-travel-awards-0) or IPA (https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/grants).

For any questions or clarifications, please contact the session organisers, Martin Kohlberger (m.kohlberger@hum.leidenuniv.nl) or Lorena Orjuela Salinas (lorena.orjuela@utexas.edu).

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The nomination deadline for SSILA's Archiving Award has been extended to October 15

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Nominations for SSILA's Archiving Award are due October 15! This award highlights the importance of creating long-term archival materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such work as more comparable to analytic research.

Read more about the Archiving Award and the nomination guidelines here.

Post-hearing testimony on Native language revitalization

Below is a message from Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada and Michal Temkin Martinez, co-chairs of the LSA Committee on Endangered Languages & Their Preservation (CELP).

We wanted to take this opportunity to thank those of you who were able to provide testimony ahead of the senate oversight hearing on "Examining efforts to maintain and revitalize Native languages for future generations" this past Wednesday. For those who are still interested in doing so, the post-hearing testimony submission period ends on Tuesday, September 4th. You may submit your testimony by email to testimony@indian.senate.gov.

You can download the hearing summary here, and the testimonies of the five panelists who addressed the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs (Jeannie Hovland, Jessie Little Doe Baird, Namaka Rowlins, Christine Sims and Lauren Hummingbird) here. There is also a detailed write-up of the hearing, along with recordings of the testimonies here. The LSA was approached to contribute to this hearing through the JNCL-NCLIS. For more information about the kind of work that the Joint National Committee for Languages and the National Council for Languages and International Studies (JNCL-NCLIS) does, please visit https://languagepolicy.org/.

Thank you for your help with this,

Jorge & Michal

CELP Co-Chairs

Final Call for Session Proposals: 6th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC)

ICLDC 6 logo

6th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation: Connecting Communities, Language, & Technology

February 28 – March 3, 2019

Hawai'i Imin International Conference Center

Honolulu, Hawai'i USA

http://icldc6.icldc-hawaii.org/

Final Call for Proposals: Papers, Posters, & Technology Showcase

Proposal Deadline: August 31, 2018

While we especially welcome abstracts that address the conference theme, Connecting Communities, Languages & Technology, we also welcome abstracts on other subjects in language documentation and conservation, which may include but are not limited to:

  • Connecting communities, languages & technology
  • Archiving matters
  • Assessing success in documentation and revitalization strategies
  • Community experiences of revitalization
  • Data management
  • Ethical issues
  • Language planning
  • Lexicography and grammar design
  • Methods of assessing ethnolinguistic vitality
  • Orthography design
  • Teaching/learning small languages
  • Topics in areal language documentation
  • Training in documentation methods – beyond the university

Presentation Formats

  1. Papers will be allowed 20 minutes for presentation with 10 minutes of question time.
  2. Posters will be on display throughout the day of presentation. Poster presentations will run during the lunch period. Poster presentations are recommended for authors who wish to present smaller, more specific topics or descriptions of particular projects.
  3. Technology Showcase is a new feature to be introduced at ICLDC 2019 is the Technology Showcase, which is a networking event for developers, linguists, and community members involved in creating, repurposing, or otherwise utilizing a wide variety of technologies for language work to interact in an informal, hands-on session. The Technology Showcase will provide an opportunity for face-to-face contact and hopefully lead to productive collaborations—both between developers and communities, and also between developers and between communities who might not be aware of others working on similar efforts. We are soliciting developers (broadly defined) to submit proposals that outline the tool that they have developed, which include but are not limited to software, apps, web technologies, repurposed uses of software, novel scripts.

For more information including abstract guidelines, online submission form and scholarship opportunities, please see the conference website.

Request for Proposals: Native Voices Endowment (NVE), Endangered Language Fund (ELF)

The Native Voices Endowment (NVE) 2018 Request for Proposals is now available on the Endangered Language Fund (ELF) website.

Click here to view the Request for Proposals.

The NVE program was created within ELF for the purpose of revitalizing and maintaining the Indigenous Languages of the American Indian Nations whose ancestors encountered the 1803–1806 Lewis & Clark expedition. For details about eligibility, please visit the Native Voices Endowment page.

If you have any questions, please email ELF at elf@yale.edu.

Monica Macaulay, President
Kristine Hildebrandt, Vice President
Endangered Language Fund

Update: Senate Hearing on Revitalization of U.S. Languages

Post updated on 8/21/18 with additional information about providing testimonies.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs is having an oversight hearing on "Examining efforts to maintain and revitalize Native languages for future generations" on Wednesday, August 22, 2018 @ 2:15 P.M. EDT.

If you work with Native American languages and communities, we urge you to consider submitting official testimony ahead of the hearing. To do so, you can email your testimony to testimony@indian.senate.gov and specify that you are sending the testimony to this hearing, and the date and time of the hearing.

The overall goal of the hearing is to highlight the diversity of languages that exist throughout Indian Country and the various resources and programs needed to support the revitalization of these diverse and unique languages. The LSA Committee on Endangered Languages & Their Preservation (CELP) have invited witnesses who represent languages that are in different stages of revitalization and hope, with the goal of showing the diversity of need throughout the various stages of revitalization.

The witnesses for the hearing are listed below:

  • Jeannie Hovland, Commissioner, Administration for Native Americans, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC
  • Jessie Baird, Vice Chairwoman, Mashapee Wampanoag Tribe, Mashapee, MA
  • Namaka Rowlins, Strategic Partnerships and Collaboration Director, Aha Pūnana Leo, Hilo, HI
  • Lauren Hummingbird, Graduate, Cherokee Nation Immersion School, Tahlequah, OK
  • Christine Sims, Director, American Indian Language Policy Research and Teacher Training Center, University of New Mexico, ABQ, NM

CELP organizers also wish to add that personal testimonies are allowed and encouraged. If you are sending personal testimony, please include your full name, title and association. Below are a few examples:

Thank you for contributing your time and effort to provide supporting testimonies in favor of the revitalization of Native American languages! Please share this announcement with anyone else that may be interested in providing testimony.

Announcement from Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada & Michal Temkin Martinez, Co-Chairs of the LSA Committe on Endangered Languages & Their Preservation (CELP)

Job: Assistant Professor, Language Diversity

The Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto invites applications for a full-time tenure-stream appointment in the area of Language Diversity. The appointment will be at the rank of Assistant Professor, and will begin on July 1, 2019.

Applicants must have earned a PhD in linguistics by the date of appointment or shortly thereafter, with a demonstrated record of excellence in research and teaching. We seek candidates whose research and teaching interests complement and strengthen our existing departmental strengths.  Candidates must have expertise and experience in syntax, semantics and experimental fieldwork of Brazilian languages with the aim of strengthening international partnerships and developing exchange and experiential learning programs with institutions and universities in Brazil.

The successful candidate will be expected to pursue innovative and independent research at the highest international level and to establish an outstanding, competitive, and externally funded research program, and maintain an active research agenda. The successful candidate will also be expected to teach and supervise students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, advance linguistically-grounded relationships with Brazil and participate in the academic life of the department.

Candidates must provide evidence of research excellence as demonstrated by a record of publications or forthcoming publications in top-ranked and field relevant journals meeting high international standards, the submitted research statement, presentations at significant conferences, accolades or awards, and strong endorsements by referees of high standing.

Evidence of excellence in teaching linguistics will be provided through teaching accomplishments, the teaching dossier, a teaching statement, sample course syllabi, and the teaching evaluations  submitted as part of the application, as well as strong letters of reference.

Additionally, evidence of deep engagement with Brazilian languages must be demonstrated in research outputs and by collaborations with Brazilian communities and existing (or planned) partnerships in Brazil.

Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

All qualified applicants are invited to apply by clicking on the link below. Applicants should submit a cover letter of no more than 2 single-spaced pages, a current curriculum vitae, a research statement outlining current and future research interests, evidence of teaching ability (a teaching dossier including a statement of teaching philosophy, sample course syllabi, and teaching evaluations) , one recent article-length writing sample relevant to the position, and the names and email addresses of three referees.  Applicants should arrange to have three letters of reference as signed documents on letterhead, preferably as a PDF document, sent directly to Sali Tagliamonte via email to linguistics@utoronto.ca with the subject line: “Language Diversity – (your full name)” by the job closing date.

Please combine your application into one or two files. If you have questions about this position, please email the contact address above.

All application materials, including reference letters should be submitted online and received by October 9th, 2018 11:59PM EST.

Submission guidelines can be found at http://uoft.me/how-to-apply. We recommend combining attached documents into one or two files in PDF/MS Word format as follows: (1) Cover letter and CV; (2) Research Statement and Teaching dossier.

The University of Toronto is strongly committed to diversity within its community and especially welcomes applications from racialized persons/persons of colour, women, Indigenous/Aboriginal People of North America, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ persons, and others who may contribute to the further diversification of ideas.

As part of your application, you will be asked to complete a brief Diversity Survey. This survey is voluntary. Any information directly related to you is confidential and cannot be accessed by search committees or human resources staff. Results will be aggregated for institutional planning purposes. For more information, please see http://uoft.me/UP.

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.