CoLang 2012

Workshops: 18 – 29 June 2012

Practicum: 2 – 27 July 2012

CoLang 2012 was a six-week Institute on Collabora­tive Lan­guage Re­search (formerly InField), held at the University of Kansas in the sum­mer of 2012, sponosred by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The Institute provided an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students, prac­ticing lin­guists, and community linguists to become trained in a wide range of skills in community-cen­tered language documentation. Suc­cess­fully held in 2008 (UCSB) and 2010 (U of Oregon), and to be held in 2014 at the U of N Texas, the six-week insti­tute consists of two parts: the Work­shops - two weeks of intensive workshops on the practice of documentary linguistics – followed by a Practicum – a four-week apprenticeship in the applica­tion of linguis­tic science and techno­logy to on-site empirical documentation (a.k.a. “field linguis­tics”). The two parts are integrated, as students who enroll in the Practicum are required to enroll in the preceding Workshops, thereby re­ceiving an intensive course in docu­mentary best practices before putting these skills to use. Participants may choose to enroll only in the two-week Work­shops.

Governance: CoLang (formerly InField) has been guided by an ad hoc committee since 2008. The community of InField/CoLang participants and instructors intend to hold the Institute every other year at different institutions. A charter statement for the Institute is now available; feedback is welcome.

Sample Practicum results (Uyghur Frog Stories):  In 2010, Uyghur was one of the three focus languages the University of Oregon (along with Northern Paiute and Wapishana). The class, which included native speaker and KU Uyghur instructor Dr. Mahire Yakup, recorded Frog Stories from three different speakers, and grammatically annotated one of these stories.  Arienne Dwyer (PI of both CoLang 2012 and the Uyghur Light Verbs project) completed annotating all three texts and in collaboration with Dr. C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, Gülnar Eziz and Travis Major, and NSF support has allowed public access to the XML versions of these Uyghur Frog Stories on the Uyghur Light Verbs website.