Guest lecture by Leora Anne Bar-El, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Montana. Everyone’s warmly welcome to participate in this event organised by the Linguistic Forum.
Salish languages have quite large and typologically unusual consonant inventories, are polysynthetic, have considerable valency-increasing and decreasing morphology, and are predominantly predicate-initial. Like most Indigenous languages of North America, the Séliš-Ql̓ispé language (spoken in Montana, USA, and a member of the Salish language family) is under-documented, under-resourced, and endangered. The existing linguistic research on Séliš-Ql̓ispé and closely related language varieties is inaccessible to those without extensive linguistic training. This is not a unique situation. Historically, linguistic fieldwork with Indigenous communities in North American was an extractive process, designed to answer academic research questions, and the results were directed solely to academic audiences, not language users or learners (e.g., Hinton 2010, Davis 2017, Meek 2017, McIvor 2020, Kroskrity 2021). Despite the shift in the field towards more collaborative models of research (e.g., Rice 2012, Leonard 2021, Venegas & Leonard 2023), and recommendations in the field of language documentation (e.g., Himmelman 2018, Leonard 2020, Austin 2021) there is still a high degree of language documentation work that results in materials that are inaccessible to language communities. The Séliš-Ql̓ispé community has been steadfastly engaged in the revitalization of the Séliš-Ql̓ispé language for the past five decades. Access to linguistic materials on the language is becoming more and more essential as learners advance their language knowledge. Moreover, we consider it our responsibility to work towards making these materials accessible.
In this talk I provide an overview of some of the grammatical features of the Séliš-Ql̓ispé language that learners find particularly challenging and discuss the approach we are taking to try to remove some of the barriers to accessing linguistic materials. I address some of the issues that arise when outsiders bring linguistic knowledge into the community and outline how we are working alongside community members to build a set of resources from a community perspective.
The linguistic forum is an informal meeting place for all linguists working at the Faculty of Humanities. We are a faculty-wide seminar activity with financial support from the faculty (since 2020). Our aim is to promote knowledge exchange and collaboration between the faculty's linguists. Read more here.
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