"InField 2010," the Institute for Language Documentation and Field Linguistics, will be held at the University of Oregon in conjunction with the Northwest Indigenous Language Institute (NILI). InField 2010 addresses the need for more and better linguistic fieldwork as the urgency for that work increases in the face of widespread language endangerment. While funds are increasingly available for fieldwork and language documentation, and communities are increasingly motivated to take steps to document and revitalize their ancestral languages, the pool of trained field linguists is nowhere near large enough to meet the need. Furthermore, the nature of field work is undergoing a rapid shift due to new technologies and increased awareness of the fieldworker's responsibilities to the speech communities, such that those who received their field training even 10-15 years ago could benefit from exposure to new tools and methods.
InField 2010 responds to all these needs by bringing together a world-class faculty to lead a two-week series of workshops in modern fieldwork methodologies. This is followed by either a week of supervised laboratory practice or a four-week intensive field methods class to give inexperienced participants the opportunity to put these methods into practice. To better serve the needs of language activists, InField 2010 will be integrated with the summer session of the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI); in addition, the weekend before InField 2010, the University of Oregon will host the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium (SILS). The collaborative atmosphere extended over a two-week period allows for extensive networking among the participants that could lead to future collaborations on a variety of projects.
