Tungumál í hættu og aðgerðir til varðveislu

Málvísindakaffi Íslenska málfræðifélagsins og Málvísindastofnunar HÍ, föstudaginn 8. desember 2017, kl. 12:00–13:00, í fyrirlestrasal í Veröld – Húsi Vigdísar.

Sebastian Drude, forstöðumaður Alþjóðlegu tungumálamiðstöðvarinnar við Háskóla Íslands, og Suzanne Gessner, málvísindamaður frá Kanada, halda tvö stutt erindi á ensku um tungumál í hættu og aðgerðir til varðveislu þeirra, með sérstakri áherslu á aðstæður í Bresku Kólumbíu. Allir velkomnir meðan húsrúm leyfir!

Language endangerment and documentation: an overview

Sebastian Drude

Twenty-five years ago, the linguistic community perceived that many languages are falling silent worldwide. Up to 90% of the world’s linguistic diversity may be lost in the coming 5–6 generations. Twenty years ago, the conceptual basis for language documentation was introduced, and since the early 2000s language documentation and conservation have been vivid subfields of linguistics and neighbouring disciplines as well as language activism around the globe.
In this talk, I show the roots and development of this field and try to give an overview of where we stand.

The situation of indigenous languages in British Columbia

Suzanne Gessner

British Columbia (BC), Canada is an area rich in linguistic diversity with 34 Indigenous languages from 7 different language families. Like many Indigenous languages around the world, languages in BC have faced deliberate policies of assimilation which have substantially reduced the numbers of fluent speakers through language shift to English. In spite of this, Indigenous community members are actively engaged in initiatives to revitalize their languages and bring them to new generations of speakers.
In this talk, I review the current status of Indigenous languages in BC and survey the strategies that are resulting in an increase in the number of second language speakers.

Sebastian Drude is the Director of the Vigdís World Language Centre at the University of Iceland. He obtained a Dr.Phil.-degree in linguistics at the FU Berlin in 2002. From 1998 on, he studied the Awetí language in central Brazil. He held a Dilthey-Fellowship at the University Frankfurt, was later Head of 'The Language Archive' at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and General Coordinator at CLARIN ERIC.

Suzanne Gessner is a language activist and instructor. As part of the language team at First Peoples’ Cultural Council she assists with community-driven language revitalization initiatives across British Columbia (Canada). Suzanne also teaches courses in linguistics, anthropology and Indigenous language revitalization at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria.