Question on assessing technology for endangered language communities

[monty hill]

chwe:'n,

i'm monty hill, a member of the tuscarora tribe of the haudenosaunee
(iroquois confederacy), and also an undergraduate student in computer
science and linguistics writing my thesis on this very topic! specifically,
i am implementing a database model of the language, in such a way to
generate meaningful output from it in the sense of creating worksheets etc
from properly labelled linguistic data.

technology, especially computers, i feel can be used to an enormous
advantage for endangered language communities as a means of both
preservation and creation of awareness of the state of the language, and
efforts made to revive it.

on my reservation, the elementary school uses technology for great purposes:
we have created a short podcast series which is shown monthly or so on the
school's CCTV station, and will soon be available on the internet once we
get our site up and running. we also have DVDs covering a couple hundred
words of vocabulary with pictures that we distributed to about 20 families
within the community.

my feelings on technology & endangered languages, to put it concisely is
that the dedication of the community is the most important thing when
considering the success of a language revitalization project. It is
necessary to have people willing to form a community of speakers, and that
the community has a strong sense of the importance of the language; it is
only in that case that it is possible to keep a language from extinction. It
is also necessary to think of language revitalization not as a personal
project; that it is not possible to save a language from a written
manuscript, be it a dictionary, grammar, or even textbook; but rather,
language revitalization of a near extinct language is more accurately
described as a re-creation of a community of speakers.


it is also very exciting to hear about the projects & efforts made by other
native people; it provides a great source of motivation and inspiration for
the massive amounts of writing i will be doing over the next two
semesters...

nya:we for your time
montgomery hill


On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Rolland Nadjiwon <mikinakn at shaw.ca> wrote:

> Dan...thank you very much. I will use it.
>
> -------
> wahjeh
> rolland nadjiwon
>
>
>
> Dan Harvey wrote:
> > Wahjeh: I am not sure what is the general policy of the forum, but you
> are free to use my statement any way you wish. I am honored that you see
> value in it.
> >
> > Jim: the Miami success is inspirational; they have a great video
> available that documents how they did it.
> >
> > dan
> >
>
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