flyer designed by Marty O’Connor
Show Your Love for Languages!
In conjunction with UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day (coming up on February 21, 2012) and Valentine’s Day, the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the UNC Undergrad Linguistics Club (Underling) team up to bring you these two fascinating events exploring the frontiers of endangered language documentation. Show some love for minority languages by attending these events!
1) Film Screening: The Linguists (Ironbound Films, 2008, 65 minutes)
Date: Monday, February 13th, 2012, 7pm-9pm Facebook event
Greg Anderson and David Harrison are scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction. Filmed in Siberia, India, and Bolivia, this documentary confronts the very forces silencing languages: institutionalized racism and violent economic unrest. The linguists’ journey takes them deep into the heart of threatened cultures and knowledge.
The Linguists world premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival went on to win many awards. Noam Chomsky calls it “a breathtaking thrill ride through the landscape of language” and the film has inspired many people around the world to get involved in language documentation. Greg Anderson is the founder of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, and one of the institute’s project coordinators, Anna Luisa Daigneault, will be present at the screening to introduce the film and to do a Q & A about endangered language documentation after the film. http://thelinguists.com/
2) Workshop: Introduction to Endangered Languages and Fieldwork Methods Date: Tuesday, February 14th, 2012, 4pm-6pm Facebook Event
Minority languages are being increasingly replaced by various politically, economically, or socio-culturally dominant ones. Every two weeks the last fluent speaker of a language passes on and with him/her goes literally hundreds of generations of traditional knowledge encoded in these ancestral tongues. Nearly half of the world’s languages are likely to vanish in the next 100 years.
The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, founded by linguist Greg Anderson, is a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting the world’s most threatened languages. Anderson and fellow institute director of research David Harrison also collaborate with the National Geographic Society in “The Enduring Voices Project”, a global initiative that focuses on the preservation and revitalization of endangered languages through linguist-aided, community-driven multi-media documentation projects.
Anna Luisa Daigneault, Latin American Projects Coordinator and Organizational Fellow at the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, will be holding a two-hour workshop on the importance of doing endangered language research in our current generation. She will provide students with an introduction to fieldwork methodology and speak about the use of digital technology in language documentation. Anna Luisa has worked in the Amazon for several years, documenting the Yanesha language and creating an oral history online database. She has also taken part in several Enduring Voices fieldwork trips to Paraguay, Chile and Peru.
For more information on the screening and the workshop, contact UNC event coordinator Natalie Feingold at ncfein@unc.edu
