The Documenting Endangered Languages program supports innovation and excellence in language documentation methodology with a view to better understand the linguistic and cognitive abilities of humans and the linguistic characteristics of individual languages. To this end, the Documenting Endangered Languages program will support the Master Classes and Special Sessions at the International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation. This conference brings together leading world experts in language documentation to share, critique, and perfect methods in documenting endangered languages. The conference has quickly become the leading venue for ideas exchange and initiative creation for the language documentation field.
A series of twelve Master Classes on eliciting and documenting various topics in grammar will be held each day of the conference. The topics will range from general treatments of first and second language acquisition in the context of endangered languages to advanced typological goals such as the elicitation and documentation of verb alignment/argument structure; tense and aspect; deixis; tone and intonation; valence changing constructions/processes; definiteness and quantification; evidentiality; and topic and focus Constructions. Each two-hour class will be taught by a leading expert in that area.
The greater societal impact of the conference will come in the exploration of links between language documentation (practice), deep understanding of grammatical structure (theory), and methods for teaching endangered languages (application). Through Master Classes and Special Sessions on Pedagogy in Language Conservation, the conference will foster discipline-wide discussion on the relationship between linguistic structure and language pedagogy, based on the premise that language revitalization is the key to keeping data alive and available for scientific study.
