InField Northern Paiute field methods class

[Margaret Florey]

Dear RNLDers,

InField 2010 <http://logos.uoregon.edu/infield2010/home/index.php> will be
held at the University of Oregon from June 21 - July 30, 2010. Several field
methods streams will be offered. Here's an opportunity to take field methods
in the Northern Paiute language, taught by Tim Thornes of the University of
Central Arkansas.

*Northern Paiute* represents the northwestern-most extension of the
Uto-Aztecan language family.  The language is highly endangered, with fewer
than 400 fluent native speakers, and in most communities the number of
speakers is in the dozens.

Language consultant-collaborators in this class will include teachers and
activists from three different Northern Paiute speech communities.  As a
result, the class will be conducted both as an opportunity to help address
the language preservation needs of those communities as well as a forum for
developing traditional data-gathering, organizational, and analytical
skills.  This course in field methods will involve a problem solving
approach that attempts to reconcile the needs of speech communities and
linguists with interests in the language.

This is a unique opportunity to blend the needs of the language activist and
the field worker in order to identify mutually benefitting outcomes. As an
extension of the collaborative field experience advocated for in the
“Blurring the lines” and “Life in the field” workshops, Northern Paiute
Field Methods will be an intensive, four week experiment in the infusion of
advocacy and empowerment to language documentation.

*Organizer/instructor*: In the summer of 1994, Tim Thornes volunteered to
work with the last speaker of Yahooskin, an undocumented dialect of Northern
Paiute, and together they produced a beginner’s phrase book and
ethno-historical study for the Klamath Tribes of south-central Oregon.  He
has since worked with speakers of the Wadateka’a (Burns Paiute) and other
area dialects from eastern Oregon and northern Nevada. In Burns, he
co-founded a language preservation group called Neme Apichaade Semenna
(People Speaking Together) and published weekly blurbs in the Tu Kwa Hone
newsletter on the language while also working on his dissertation, “A
Northern Paiute Grammar with Texts,” which he defended in 2003. He has
presented and published widely on aspects of Northern Paiute grammar and has
served as an instructor with the Northwest Indian Languages Institute (NILI)
and he University of Oregon’s Summer Session in Language Documentation. He
is currently an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of
Writing at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

For more information on workshops and other field training opportunities,
consult the InField field
methods<http://logos.uoregon.edu/infield2010/field-training/index.php>website.

kind regars,
Margaret



-- 
Margaret Florey
Consultant linguist
Director, Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity <www.rnld.org>

Email: Margaret.Florey at gmail.com
Ph: +61 (0)4 3186-3727 (mob.)
skype: margaret_florey
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