 good afternoon everyone so on the first note I would like to welcome professor Shobana Chalier who is a distinguished research professor and also a SOC Dean and also a full-bright Nehru fellow 2022 of North University of Texas and he's the director of Corsa which man will talk about what is Corsa letter and today we are fortunate to have him because I think as with the director of discussing maybe it is the first collaboration with one of the private colleagues in England or maybe even in India so we're very fortunate to have ma'am and we also look forward for long-term collaboration and also to discuss how we can work together on the languages and also the technology that we can develop for the under-resourced languages so we're very fortunate and today she will be speaking on the topic given here the importance of language documentation and funding opportunities for Indian languages so please feel free to interact after our talk and at the end will have like more informal conversation so please please please feel free that's what I mean to say so thank you everyone for here also and I look forward and we look forward to have a wonderful time yeah thank you so I before I give time to Professor Shobana I would like to welcome our director to kindly give her small token thank you so with that I give time to ma'am yeah hello good afternoon everyone and thank you so much for the warm invitation to come and speak to this college it looks like a wonderful place to study I saw all the people as we were driving in and I said to dr. Michael everyone looks so young but it's it makes me feel so happy to see you all here studying and seeing all the opportunities ahead for you and I hope that today's talk can inspire you in some way for for that future of what you're planning and your studies so I am originally from South India but I have been working for many years in the US almost 30 years in the US but I come back every year and as I've been coming back as a linguist I've noticed that there's been a need I'm trying to get to this presentation mode here I noticed that there was a need here and in all the people that I've talked to the linguists and the students that as they were working in their linguistic worlds they were not feeling like their work was being seen enough and they were also publishing things that very often ended up on a bookshelf somewhere and people are not using it and I felt like there was such good work being done there should be a way to shout out that that work was being done and bring it to the world and also increase the usability of that material so when a few years ago about but maybe about five six years ago I started talking to my library at the University of North Texas where I work about creating a digital archive for the languages of South Asia so that linguists and even people who are not linguists if they're interested in things that have to do with language could bring their materials and deposit them with us and we would find a way to tell the rest of the world that it was there and it was important and how could it be used to the reuse the access and also very important preservation so that's what Horsal is about and I'm going to tell you a little bit about why do something like that what's the importance of documenting a language and many of you speak a language which is not written or read very often there may be a Bible there may be him knows but there probably isn't a newspaper for example or story books and so what would be important about the archive could it contribute to creating a more of a literature in your language so all of these things we will want to discuss today so let me get started with that and that's this is what I wrote a book about this recently and you can Google Springer why language documentation matters it's a very small 90-page book if you're interested in I can hear the PDF if your students want to you know look at it it goes through and talks about the various community and linguist cooperation that has made some of the studies of language possible in North America in Australia and also in Northeast India so you would be interested I think in those case studies the book of case studies and there I start out with this very kind of traditional definition of what is language documentation when you say language documentation somebody they have no idea what it means so linguistics is a very vast field because it talks about all the different aspects of language so you talk phonetics today you also talk about language change the history of English so phonetics and history of English that kind of thing historical music that's one part of it and then there's like studying how the sentences work there's also studying the politics of language but for all of that we need to know something about the language to start with and for many of our languages in Northeast India there's hardly anything that's been written about them so if you think about your own language the language that you speak natively your home language think about what's been written about that language in terms of is there a dictionary is there a grammar is there some digital availability can you Google with that language for I work with on the language make it on which is broken in money for a state almost 1.2 3 million speakers you cannot have you can't Google with it I think they have the beginnings of a Google bar but it's not you don't have voice recognition there's so many things that you have for English and German not available for our languages so language documentation is the thing which creates the resource the basic resource that allows us to have all of these new things that the world has for English and so all the new digital kind of goodies that the world has for the big languages language documentation creates a lasting record of a language that has few digital resources so the lasting record part of it is very important language documentation is not just like writing down a little bit about a language and then putting it in your CV but you want to make it something that'll be preserved forever so that you can use it later on I can use it later on and many generations from now can use it later on there's a case study that I discuss in that book of somebody who spoke the Miami language his family spoke it he's actually a McCarthy genius winner award of that won one of the McCarthy genius awards his name is Baldwin I'm forgetting his first name right now Darrell Darrell Baldwin and Darrell Baldwin's family spoke me on me and his grandparents did but by the time it came to his parents no one spoke the language anymore in the old days we would call that an extinct language or a dead language we don't say that anymore we call them sleeping languages the reason a lot of it has to do with Darrell Baldwin and his family Darrell Baldwin decided that he wanted to learn his language and he was very sad that it was no longer available so he went to an archive he went to the National Archive in the US and he looked for the lasting record of that language and he learned about that language with the help of a linguist and then he taught he spoke only in that language to his kids his wife was white she was not me I'm here but they only spoken me I'm here together and they created the next generation of first language speakers of me I'm here so the sleeping language where the connection with ancestors was lost was then revived to this lasting record so lasting record is very important for for that kind of also revival and preservation of our culture so that's the second part of it digital language reports study support linguistic study but also revitalization of language so many of you who speak languages may not be aware of the fact that your languages are not being spoken as much as they were last generation but most of our languages in northeast are slowly being spoken less and less at home and we need to have these digital records to make sure that they're secure and that we can teach you to our kids to do language documentation what does it take to be a documentary linguist what does it take to be a documentary filmmaker I need my camera I need a crew I need to have good you know good ideas about how to make fancy like cutaways and music and you know that's what you do when you're a documentary filmmaker if you're a documentary linguist what is it that you need to do a lot of it is just stuff that you and I do already for example recording so how many of you record yourselves on your phones like send messages through whatsapp people are smiling but they're not putting their hands up so I think many of you do probably on your phone right now you probably have videos of your friends doing funny things or you singing a song or something like that right yeah so you already are documenting things documentary linguists record natural interactions between people some of it can be storytelling but a lot of it can be just talking with each other because if we want to keep records of the language we want records of natural use but we also want things like all of the traditional stories because they hold so much information in them for future generations that that would be important so we record and we decide what to record we can talk about that if you have some questions what to record then we are very good with where we were trying to make people aware of the fact that when you record a lot you have a lot of files again I would like to talk to you about your phones because we all have a phone how many of you have a lot of photographs on your phone many many photographs right and a lot of times we have duplicates of the same thing 50 pictures of me looking at something you know take it again take it again so we want good data management once we start recording because it's so easy to record we can have hundreds of recordings and we won't know how to use them unless we have information about them so we need to have good file naming practices this sounds so boring right but if you record well with very good equipment placement good lighting just like the documentary filmmaker and you do good practices with data management the next step of being a documentary linguist becomes much easier and so I think all of you if we can teach you just those or find out what you're doing for data management and then make some suggestions you could be documentaries very easily of your family languages by recording and then doing that data management the next step is really for a little bit advanced so what I want to say is documentary linguistics or document language documentation up to these first two points is really open for all of us to be involved in and it's also open for all of your family to be involved in anybody can learn how to record well and manage their files well and then they can hand that over to the linguist who can then go on to the next steps here so I really invite all of you to think about yourselves as language documentors and if you have you know want to talk more about how we can we can discuss how you can get into the next steps or you can incorporate or participate with linguists on the next steps so recording data management then the next step like what I would do is I would listen to some of the things I've reported and I would transcribe them I would try to write them down I would either write them down phonetically like you've been teaching your students about the international phonetic alphabet or if that is difficult then I might also use the practical orthography like what your Bibles are written in or your hymnals are written in there may be some variation in the spelling it may not be perfect people may still not agree on how things need to be spelled but you have some basic idea how to spell it so we might listen to what is being said and write it down with those three things you know the recording the data management the file naming and your transcription you're ready to send something to an archive and have something that has your name on it as a published item a digitally published item but if you have more of an interest you could also go on to translating it and then providing some analysis of it for making something data management we also data management especially data management here is really we've got data management in two places the first place is file naming and I don't know if you look on your hard drives what your file naming systems are like how you've named your files it may be if you're like anybody else it's probably kind of messy like first you name your files in one way sometimes you add the date sometimes you just say stuff I need to do sometimes it says let me delete this later or you know you've got a whole number but if you're going to be doing this kind of work you have to be very careful about naming your files okay so that's the first data management the second data management has to do with saying who what which where when how about the item that you collected just like a good journalist like I collected grandpa telling a traditional story about a clever monkey and how he tricked an old man when was it told how old was grandpa do I have grandpa's name what dialect a variety of the languages grandpa speak some basic information about the storyline all of those things are necessary for good data management to know what that file is really about then we've got the archiving part and then letting people know that it's there disseminating that information and then trying to then get together with other people to see how you can use or reuse that information so let me I think I actually have really squeezed in everything that I want to say in one slide and now I'm kind of portioning it out a little bit here's some of the kinds of equipment that we try to use we really focus on the good microphones and storage I think you've got you've got some of do you have some kits some language documentation kits so some of your students know about these things already but I think that this is like the perfect thing we want really good microphones and good recorders and so on but you could also in a pinch if you are at home it's a best festival times and somebody starts singing you could use your phone you could use WhatsApp if somebody has a great idea about what how curry is made and you never realize that the pork had to be boiled in a certain way and this is these are the herbs that you use don't feel shy about using your phone in those instances to get at least the initial or even it may be the only record but the only thing is that when you're using your phone there's certain things you want to check like is it recording in wave format and and what is the format it's taking pictures and so on but your phone might be a good alternative if you have nothing else so these are some of the things that we look at and in terms of recording did you want me to say any I think that this is good for this yet then we also use some other software that we've been talking about in our online course to take the recorded sound and then provide that trend transcription and I was telling you that you might write it in IP or you might write it in like our photography well it's very difficult if it's on your phone like how am I going to do that with it on my phone do I have to like stop it and start it we don't have to do that anymore nowadays we have a lot of software that allows us to slow down the speech here little loops of speech and even in some cases there are things which where you can run a program and have a certain amount of automatic transcription done that if you're interested in doing some computational linguistic work or trying out some of those tools for automatic translation or alignment those will be fun to try on some of those so for example if we had a tool for money how would it work on out now it might be some some success so this is what we use this these tools for these are free in other words there's no barrier between you and me and good transcription and translation because it's free you put it on a PC doesn't work on a Mac unfortunately but you put a PC and off you go they're also good keyboard so this is not important for you so much because I think most of our languages here not a man we use the Roman script so and we use some some marks sometimes an accent here and there but probably something we can do with the regular keyboard but if you're using they've not read this very useful for example it can help you get the mathras and everything to switch from English to the other keyboard easily there's a there's also software that helps you do subtitling same or also helps you do that so if you're interested in creating in let's imagine a story a traditional story that you really like and you want to create access to that story you could use something like say more into the transcription and then use the same more files that export from similar to do the subtitles so how many of you do YouTube YouTube videos anybody make YouTube videos see against see I do get I'm starting to get some hands going up yeah who doesn't make a YouTube video even I have YouTube videos but what you need to do with YouTube then oftentimes you want to give subtitles and YouTube helps you do those subtitles this is exactly the same technology it provides you with an SRT file so you can write like the Naga if you want to do how you can have that and then you can also underneath the English so you can either have just the the language in question or the English translation or both so say more is really useful for that kind of dissemination as well then we also this is like a little bit advanced okay so this will be for the next step if you collect the story then you will start an avalanche of research and an avalanche of good things for your communities because not only can you do the YouTube videos with that and that disseminates like cultural knowledge and keeps it going and tells people hey pay attention we have good stories we have our heroes we have our themes just like you guys do in the West right we can do that with our stories but you also help the linguists create dictionaries which you can contribute continue to contribute to so there are our tools that we're talking about in our class like a tool called flex FLEX also free that allows you to take like a story that has been transcribed so let's say it was like long time ago there was a man right so if I type that into flex you can take the word man and put it in the dictionary it'll take the word long time put it in the dictionary and I can gradually each sentence this program is starting to remember the words in your language so at the end of 20 stories all of a sudden I have this great lexicon or dictionary that I can use to show the kids build picture books build a better dictionary so there's there's a lot of usefulness in creating stories collections and then there's more that's that people can do with their linguists they can actually look at the structure of the language through those stories something that in India we really need to do and we haven't been doing and I know the linguists here can contradict me or discuss with me but I feel like we will not be better linguists and we will not understand our languages until we start doing more of this connective text so you could be also the first people to help with that by collecting the stories so this is what we've discussed so far that language documentation is something that in the old days was something we did with pen and paper we sat down and we would say can you tell me a story in your language and I would write down I would record it maybe with you know we had the old I've seen those old cassette tapes so I did all of my in my work in money for on cassette tapes and and then I had an old recorder and I would play it and then I would put the pause button and I would write down what was said then I'd put play again and with many of us my age joke about how many tape recorders we've broken because we have to press the pause button none of that is necessary or technology has pushed our field forward so much all we have to do is grab that technology and join the rest of the world in linguistic discovery in addition to that we can add all community members in this venture and all other academics so if you're in history political science if you're an anthropology if you're in literature studies tribal studies you can contribute to this venture by collecting the histories that you think are important right not that what I want to collect as an outsider but what do you what does your family think is important that needs to be added to the record and that needs to be a part of the lasting record and bring it up in this format of the recorded portion video is really good but if you can't do video do audio really high fidelity recording is really good if you can't use your phone but if you can do that much and do good file naming and good do basic metadata who what which where when how then you can be part of this whole venture of making a lasting record and so that is that is what so far the next step of this though there's one piece that we haven't discussed is once you do that where does this stuff go where are we going to put it and in the past most of the time it was sitting in on a server in the in a linguistics department or English department or a hard drive like I've asked a lot of people as I've been traveling I've been to I was telling director co-creator I went to Silcha I went to a money poor I went to the money poor music the money poor University of culture and I going to Central Institute Indian languages many of these places when you ask people so you're doing language documentation that's fantastic you're recording precious material there only 300 speakers left of Karam that's great where is your material and they say on my phone or on a hard drive oh I got it all backed up on a thumb drive but you and I know that like I actually we in Silcha there were two gals who were so sad about it because they said yeah we had this great stuff and but one of them had a baby and the baby dropped the phone in the water and gone and it's life and you cannot I mean it's almost like you're holding a precious artifact from Mesopotamia or something and you're letting it you know sit on your coffee tables that can fall because this is precious stuff because our elders are going in the Lankan community where I work in Chandel and Chandel money for state we lost so many elders to COVID and this time when I was working with my young you know consultant Rex every day we would say like oh my wish Swami was still here he would know you know that meant the information is with Swami and we were going to bring Swami to the US to to work on stuff and he's gone so it's real like we our elders are going in the information is leaving so we don't want to leave our stuff in hard drives we don't want to leave them on pen drives so I am encouraging that's the one of the reasons why we belt course all too I'm encouraging a very simple workflow so I'd like to share that with you now and I may repeat myself later on on another slide but the workflow is you do the collection then you email us and say I collected something and it may be that you're collected in conjunction with your professors for a class that's very possible you may do it as a tetso college signature you know capstone assignments that students are doing or you may do it as an individual I mean whichever way you do it if you are passionate about it all you have to do is email us it's like course all UNT a Gmail or something that sort I can let you know about those details and then because I know our communities what we've done is we've set up like a partner with one of my students so we partner you with one of my students and that student contacts you depending on how often you want to be contacted and says okay we got a week now let's talk about where your files are now let's talk about your file naming then she my students right now are all female so they then she will help build your metadata or your who what which where went out and then she'll ask you about what do you want to say about your collection what do you want to call you know what what is it what you want to call the language what do you want to give description in your language and in English that sort of setting up the portal to your collection and that's it that's really the process and what we do then is we put all of that in queue for our other collections and our digital librarian takes over we have a fantastic partnership with our digital library they take over and then they do their archival thing they create several different versions of the files one of them goes into a deep archive one of them is an mp3 working like a smushed file like a compressed file we hope that you can give us the wave files so we can archive the wave files and have the mp3 for streaming they may help us trim files they'll tell us if they're duplicates all of those things that need to be done for an archive and they'll put them in the archive and they'll contact us again we go in and check we put in the information and we release it so that process what did you have to do in that process main thing was you have to do the recording and you have to send the email and so we hope that we've simplified that process so that we can really get more and more of you interested in participating once the process is in where we will we will want to like build research projects on the basis of that that may be specific to what linguists want to do for example Dr. Weiko and I were talking at lunch about doing a reconstruction of the histories of sound change in with for the languages of Netherlands in order to study how languages have changed you know they all we believe they're building start from a common ancestor and then through natural sound change have diversified so that I know several different languages we would be able to use the data that's there to then build a story about how languages have changed so you start with the source data you provide the basic analytic tools through all of you then the linguists can take over and go if we don't have the source data we can't really ask the questions this definition comes from the National Science Foundation National Science Foundation is one of the biggest funders for language documentation work and you'll notice that it says the National Science Foundation a lot of times people don't don't agree with or don't think of the fact that documentary linguistics is very much in the science realm as well as in the humanities realm it's humanities because it's about our cultures and it's you know anthropological study it really is about our identity it's all of those things that have to do with that kind of social science but then it's also in information and computational science because of all the things I told you about how it has to go into the archive there's data-based stuff involved there's there's possibility for future future work so it is in the science National Science Foundation and so you can read here why they're they're funding it because not only in India but all over the world languages are dying out and so they know that this is an irreplaceable treasure and so not only for the communities which is very super important and I'd like to talk to you about that and actually ask you to also talk a little bit at this point okay so it's very important for science but it's also important for communities how is it important for you I'd like to ask you and so all of that untapped information about about culture and about language will disappear and so this is why we are trying to to document the language and I mentioned that I've written this book about language documentation matters and that in this I discuss those those questions but what I wanted to discuss just very briefly with you and ask you about is in the first half of that book I discussed how it's important for just social well-being and I think a lot of times we don't I don't know how many of you here are going to be anthropologists or sociologists but there's one thing that could be studied and that is how things improve when people are connected with their language and cultures there's anecdotal evidence and also some that they've done where the statistical kind of backing of it where in Native American from Native American groups who've been very much cut off from their languages and cultures because there was a lot of laws at least one generation who would be probably like my age there be in their 60s maybe maybe 60s and 70s by now but they were not allowed to teach their language to speak their languages when they were in boarding schools the Britain you know the government put them in boarding schools and so that filtered to the rest of the family life because they were so embarrassed about their languages that they never spoke them to their kids so now people who are in their 50s 40s and 30s don't speak the language but people who are 20 and 30 are saying like no way I want to speak my language you can't tell me so it's almost like this reverse identity and they are saying yes my parents are completely messed up my parents like and there is a lot of you know that's my phone saying it's too funny thinking about turning off some plane or something I needed to catch so what what's happening now is that kids are saying I want to re-engage with my culture and they're doing it through language and they're learning the language and learning cultural things like how to build a basket how to make moccasins how to go hunting through and hearing the language and the studies are showing that kids who are engaged in that are doing much better in just like and in school there was also a study done in Canada which I also report in the book I'm sorry I forget the details of who was doing the study but where they discovered that in those communities where they were doing language and culture activities they find a decrease in suicide rates which had for some reason really skyrocketed among youth and that had improved and then also caused a diabetes phase which also shows ill health right all around bad habits and so on that those have decreased as well so there's a real potential of if language and culture engagement happens that it might be something that helps people find connections with their past and feel have a sense of identity they can be proud of so some of this work is really important I think so I wonder like I've talked a lot and I don't know if any of you will talk but we can ask the question I mean do you feel like or let me ask the question like this in your families in your communities are there some people who are already doing this kind of work of working on languages know some some of you're saying no not at all and you have like uncle who has been recording people or any websites that have been created no well go out and investigate and see that if you've missed it maybe it's there and you don't know maybe there is there a literature society go out and find out if there's a literature society for your community that that there is okay and do they produce books or what community I dream I'm actually very into lexigraphy and what they're missing out on them so it's just great so I think that's where maybe I'll dream myself here that's fantastic yeah so they're interested so they're collecting things and now they want to actually put them someplace safe and have you know have more visibility for them yeah and what what community okay so I think that it would be interesting if I talk about money for their like 30 on languages there there's lots of literature societies and so many people have collected things and they don't even realize how much material they have like there was a we have a comb collection KOM and she came on the comb professor came to one of my workshops there and she said well I have a few things and you know my neighbors have some things and you know I really think we should save them because after they started collecting them there was more than a few things and there were collections of stories we have a comb collection now and you can see by the books that they're very old and but they have there are there's written literature on home now available for the next generation to build on it so look look under your parents bed maybe ask them first is there an old story book is there a genealogy is there a book of Proverbs did somebody ever write anything about spelling do you know if there's an alternate hymnal has anybody revised the Bible have how many versions of the Bible do you have mom and dad because all of those things will tell us something about the history of your language and all of those things the print things are also worthwhile for for putting in our the archive so so I think you know maybe I'll leave it at this that you can think about you know your own situation if you were to engage or if you are connected how is that making a difference for you and your personal life but it seems like it has for then I just will point you since many of some of you here are in you know our interest in oral as literature as literature the verbal art and poetics entry here if you look at what they call discourse analysis or poetics or verbal art I don't know how to put a percentage of it on it but let's just put a wild thing like 70% most of what we know about that most of the theorizing on that comes from Western art right Western oral art because that's what we know about because we have not really published much about what we have here in the North East even if we have stuff in India that's mostly you know maybe they're religious texts we've got that you know we've got kids stories that are very popular that are known around the world but those are from other languages not from the Northeast Indian languages there are different ways of thinking about life there are different things that are important in terms of values and heroes and relationships in the Northeast that nobody knows about and so people don't really understand the cultures here so if you you know so this is for verbal art and poetics this is an addition to that which has to do with how how a story is actually structured so I'm just gonna give you two seconds of one minute of like a what I mean by that if you study like I wrote a paper about a famous money-poorish story that and I was looking at the rhetorical structure of it how is it actually put together and what you find there is that when it's when you look at the episodic pieces like going from one part of the story to the other there are places where things are paused there are introductions of the same kinds of words like after that at that time once once that happened a very very different from what you find in some other stories some other kinds of stories are that part is very similar what's very different is how long the sentences are because the sentences really never end you just say you have a sentence you say after that and then and then and then and then you finally have an ending of the story so the way the stories are structured are really dependent on the linguistic structure as well in our start our languages here are very different so you could really make a killing on your thesis if you weren't able to do something on this all right let me see how much longer to join are we kind of getting to a closing point was that the second part of the funding part of it okay so if you're if you're interested in in more of this like what are the discoveries that we can make with with more linguistic study that I think I can pass my book around to you and you can take a look at some of these other issues and I will actually not look anymore at my PowerPoint and I'm going to go to a nice slide right at the end here all right so for funding I have a when you start planning a project what you'll discover is that there actually are a lot of people a lot of different types of groups that are interested in funding this work some of them are interested from the science perspective and some of them are interested from the humanistic perspective and some of them from the folklore perspective so the Firebird Anthropological Association is very interested in stories and story collections and especially when collected by people from the communities so if you either are from the community or a partner from the community working create if you can create a group of people and you're meeting it then then this would be something they would be very interested in doing and they give out smaller grants but like five thousand six thousand dollars but that can go a long way in Northeast India so we could develop quite a bit with the Firebird Foundation grants then there are there are private foundations that are either in the UK or in the US and the Endangered Language Fund is one Nick Ulster's one I forgot to put that one down but I forgot what it's called but there's one addition one I'll tell you about you left Endangered Language Fund for example right now has special monies for what they call legacy collections so if there is a collection that say a professor who is working on your language has then you could apply for money to help bring those things into an archive so I for example when I started working did not have digital world with me so I have a lot of mess in some of the work that I did previously I could hire a student to help bring that forward and those are again around four to five thousand five thousand dollars we got one of those to work on coke baroque and professor Madisof's coke baroque collection so now there's some coke baroque on the archive the the ELDP grants the Endangered Language Documentation Project grants right are from not from SOAS anymore they're from Leverburg and they are also private they're from Arcadia Foundation and their goal is really to work with severely endangered and under documented languages but there are very many different types of funding categories there that you could apply for these are all the ones that I know of that are available to people in India the National Science Foundation has again grants that are from you know hundred thousand dollars to two four hundred fifty thousand dollars I currently have three of those and they're all for working on languages Northeast India and one for Haka life but these are available if you partner with somebody in the US and so you have to have a US based researcher so what do you need to do to apply for funding and why do they care about this well there the funders would like to see a product at the end they'd like to see all of them require archiving you have to know how to archive and you have to show that you have intent to archive and public access of those materials that is the standard goal these days of science for from psychology to linguistics and the funders are also asking for that so if you have a link with an archive and you've got that workflow set you have one foot in the door for saying I know what I'm doing and I get that done what else are they looking for they want to see that you're gonna have you have a clear vision and then you have the right team that you're gonna have the right team to really build that project so I just put a few things together and think about figure out you know who in the community because you wanted to really for ELDP and for NSF and ELF as well community involvement is very important they don't want us to be academics who say I'm going to work on central Winston language and just go in there and work on it that's an old bottle that worked in the old days but now we have technologies kind of level the playing field and everybody can be involved so who in who's working on the languages in the community what is the most need that they find what already has been done what needs to be added and on the basis of these things then figuring out how to put together a viable plan and I'll be more than happy to like talk about that in like excruciating detail because I also I don't know if you do that but I ran the National Science Foundation for about three years and then I've been teaching this course for the Collaborative Language Institute so but but I think the thing to know is that this is fundable work and it is fundable from an institutional level it's fundable for people who are individual professors and it's fundable for teams of students working with with a professor and I think that that you know definitely for an Avalon you can do something bigger was there anything else that we want to say about funding in particular yeah definitely you're interested in this idea or you're very welcome to meet with me and I I think I would love for you to pull out your phones and you know Google course all dot UNT.edu and take a look at our website and under archive you go to archive you'll see the different collections that we have right now and as I've been traveling the country we've added up I think there are at least 10 more that will be coming into the doc for people who said oh yeah we've got stuff that we really need to do something with so please look at the website and I will close with just one thing if you'll allow me one second more I want to tell you that course is not it's not like a it's not a myth or something it's really I myself am really excited by the fact that we are bringing native speakers of languages to my university so we already brought social cooler there from from chandell she did her master's now she's doing her PhD Drew Blancasa is there he's a Dimasa speaker he just started his MA after many fights with COVID you know not allowing him to get on the plane he's finally doing his master's with us we have my my colleague Sadat Munshi has brought several speakers of Burjavski we have speakers of a language called Manchiali of next semester I'm working on bringing Boros speaker and already professor of link the doctorate of linguistics profila basu matari there as our archivist in residence he's going to be working on archiving his residence materials with us he's coming as a visiting scholar I'm hoping I just put the paperwork in to bring a marching Mayan Lumbum who's a player of the Pena and to digitize all of the Pena recordings of his father was a professional Pena player who holds that information from the VCR tapes and to create a record so it's a real thing it's happening and I would love for you guys to be involved in it you know in some way because it's a rolling it's going so yeah so so become joint course all in some some way or the other and thank you for your attention thank you for your invitation and I'm happy to take some questions now or we can make thank you I think maybe we can have quick Q&A session in considering like recording or I'm hiding a story or any folk right in one consideration I mean when looked at from my dialect point of view I think I have noticed that the way the story starts it's a very I would take a little different one because it's not once upon a time right so in our dialect it is something like which means since the beginning of time now it's great question about how do we like determine when the time like the time frame was also even treated and it seems like the thought process and the whole lot of it so and now also considering a place like Nagaland which has like been Christianized all for quite long now questioning the idea of the beginning of time becomes really really controversial or sometimes even how about yeah good really good good good thoughts that you had here because I think for this process we're talking about right now try to be as literal as possible and knowing that there will be interpretation that has to come later because if you think about any fine literature for example or if you even think about the Bible think about all the interpretations that have been written up in the Bible we cannot be responsible for the final interpretation what we're trying to say is we're responsible we're just saying there is something there to be interpreted so as you're saying if it's talking about from time immemorial or if it's to you just would say exactly literally what the words are saying and you are free to say I as a speaker or I as a part of this community know that this could mean many different things but I'm just giving you the basic literal translation of it letting the figurative come later because what has happened in Manipur is that a lot of people have decided not to you know they say oh it's too complicated there's too many meanings and so they haven't done some of the work with the oldest literature because it's sacred and they're afraid to make a mistake with it and I can totally understand that but if we have to watch out for not doing it at all because we're afraid so if you are really afraid at least give a summary if you don't want to do word-for-word give a summary this story is about and that in itself will at least preserve it for later later study but there are sometimes words which cannot be translated in English which has to be used as the S so if has to be like you know translated it takes a sentence right how do we consider that and that is fine that is fine to do so when you're doing translation like we're not trained in translation and we're not expected to be like perfect you know following some sort of translation theory work but and you can leave some of that to the linguists later on to actually decompose something that might be an idiom or proverb that can happen later but you can actually put brackets around it and say this is a phrase that means this or this is a word that means this phrase and that's enough for that for that first pass of explanation because so many of those things are like sometimes that they are languages in this region have something called elaborate expressions where we have two forms so instead of just saying fruit for example we may say fruit fruit we don't mean lots of fruit we're just that phrase fruit happens to have fruit dash fruit one is high the other one is high high it just means fruit and but because of these elaborate expressions we might get stuck and say oh I don't know what to do we just we just do the basic fruit dash fruit and leave it at that and go on because this is more of a deeper lexical graph both you know somewhat else's problem someone else's happy problem also because a lot of these languages there's nothing written no work has been done so this is just a starting point anybody else who will come later will be able to work on what we have created now so that way the simpler one is will do for now yes and if I'm actually not saying what the standard view is so if you're doing a documenting an e-lar for example or any of the other language archives they really would like you to have the transcription and at least that's what they call time-aligned transcription so you take the sound file and you have a you know what each word means for example what the word sounds like transcribe they would like at least that much but I think that for our population here we have so many different types of depositors and so many different types of people want to be in on this the game here that we would lose that opportunity if we insisted on that and so I would like to really open the door for the source files and some metadata to be in there and to let that be the first publication for those people as well maybe they'll be interested in doing the transcription later but you could always train your next phonetics class here are 10 stories in home and we're going to now sit down and bring some speakers in and work with them to do the transcription stories in theory not going to do it what's your end goal that you seek of course so or the relationship that yeah yeah it's like sooner or later I'll have to retire so then what is it that I've been trying to accomplish before that so my end goal is having a workflow set up and talking very practically here right so having enough funding and and workflow set up so that this process that we're talking about can just go on without any one person being there and we're getting close to that stage now in terms of getting administration and so we need a staff position of somebody who's gonna be a curator we need you know all of that to setting up a machinery that can keep going but my my own personal research goal is to get enough material in a format and course so where we can ask higher level linguistic questions so it's computationally there transcribed well and then I can compare against several languages and try to figure out why something works the way it does where are the differences and words and what are the similarities between those languages so that would be that would be like a great use of an archive if we can make that happen so I would like to try that and we were talking about that for sounds but you can extend that to also grammatical constructions oh if I could add one more goal which is for all of you know now we have this new mother tongue you know mother tongue importance that the Indian government has given but if you talk to teachers like we've been talking to the borough teachers it's like what materials are available how are we going to do this how are you going to teach in our mother tongue grades 1 to 6 or whatever it is they want to do and so some of my students are looking into the uses reuse of archival materials for teaching mother tongue and what how can we derive and I had you know it's going to talk a little bit about that how can we derive teaching materials from what's in the archive if you put a story in there that was going to be really good material for all sorts of teaching culture teaching basic words and all of that but history also you can intermingle then world history with the not a world view and so on so I think that would be so good because otherwise things sit in an archive they're never used so I would love to have like a slate of students who are working like pedagogical uses of maybe we can clap I think I'll give a little time to our director Thank you Professor Shorana for flying all the way for being here and for all the work that you're doing especially in the northeast eastern region you know on behalf of the college and the community over here I'd say that I think your rules the intentions that in which you started and then choosing that so college also to be part of course so is something that we're really happy about something that we feel we take this responsibility seriously and for us what we hope is that we can whatever we started this would just be the beginning and it's something that we can build upon and probably try to take it forward because our institution it's a small one it's one that's growing we have yes young people or we all just look young but then ultimately what we want is of course the same dream I mean we want to be self-sufficient in a way where we can try to help our society to try to help our community over here because we you know our end goal basically is to create a positive impact in the world by empowering people towards lifelong excellence so I think we want to build upon this relationship to try to see what we can do we feel that there is urgent need especially to document our languages and we see it integrating with every other department not just the linguistics but connects with all the other departments because we also feel that languages carry culture and there's so many things that are passed on about it and it's just not present in our society so there is a fear from our own side as well what we see is that we're we're scared of the way at how fast we're losing our culture identity our language and also just the whole you know the whole concept of you know learning and the whole thing that's happening in a society we're just quite I mean we have a certain concern about it so it was very refreshing to hear that you feel that young people are actually going back and then going back and speaking their languages and things like that you know and then and which is I feel is also very true for these 50s people are probably doing that and I think we're seeing that in our own you know homes and societies right now and you know as an institution though I think we would like to try to make sure we can do what we can to try to preserve it and further this goal most people in our society are not even aware of what linguistics as a subject is I think the students who are here right now I see a few you know you have done a fantastic job just by picking this subject and you have the potential to probably unlock and probably you have the difficulty and support here as well to make sure that you know you unlock your full potential to try to see all the opportunities in this and probably you would be you know you're expected to probably help your juniors as they come in but you're also in some way you also torch theirs for this subject in not just this college but actually this entire state I hope I'm not putting too much pressure on the two of you I see sitting here but this is the same thing that we have told our faculty when this course was started the thing is that linguistics as a subject is still quite new in our society and you know the but the potential is enormous and I hope that the students who are sitting over here you know you look at this as an opportunity maybe who knows you'll wind up at University of North Texas if you heard the examples or maybe some other thing and I hope the teachers or even individual students you also look at those funding opportunities because it's not about the funding per se but then it's about the impact that you can create and you know the history that you're leaving behind if you're able to create something like this and I think based on the end goal of what Corsal is going to be and what you know that so-called it also wants to be I think we all of us here need to work together and your own individual departments which may not be connected to linguistics right now can probably also find an area where they're you know there are opportunities for collaboration so we you know we are very grateful thank you so much a kid we hope to get to know you better later on as well and I'd just like to thank you that I think the Department of Linguistics for this collaboration for organizing this program and for handling everything so well you know I think you have a very bright future and I think that this department can grow to become one of the strongest not just in the college but in the states good luck to all the students and to all the teachers thank you I think for for the interesting talk I think most of us will be new to this idea or even likewise documentation apart from few who are in the course online but I encourage like all of us as a colleagues to put heads together and think something if there could be some collaborative project that could be done interdisciplinary towards some documentation or something like that and men will be really happy to help and support even to get grant actually if we are clear with our vision and plans and men actually yeah I she is the director of the National Science Foundation for for three years yeah so she she knows ins and our up and down how things work inside so we're very very fortunate to collaborate with her so as I said it's just a start we work together wherever we are as a team and and also all the department if we can come up something in this coming weeks or year I mean semester that would be wonderful and also with the course that we're doing we also plan to publish a special volume on oral narration that few of us are joining so those who could not join also you're welcome to jump in and see how we can work together we will try to help each other as much as possible but the idea is at least to come up with some oral narration as a special volume published by Corsair so it will be solely from from the 10 so team like a special volume which the idea is we all have to work so only I cannot do that so we have to contribute the articles we're ready to help and train you the skills how to use the software and apart we can do as a team yeah that I want to remind also I thank you director for always being supportive and we always inspired by your very far vision that you have yeah so with that I would like to welcome Dr. Kema for the portal thanks so yeah maybe she has another way to thank you thank you I don't have anything else to add to the previous gratitude that you have already showered but yeah I just have to say one thing which is in this time when technology has steeped all our lives we are all drowned in technology and like our virtual lives are equally if not more important than our real lives in this time at this time to bring in technology to do something so useful to the communities to the world to the field of academics to the field of knowledge I think that's a very important thing and so I thank Professor Shorna for bringing this into the midst of all of us and for introducing this to everybody present here and for offering all the help that she has already offered and that she has already also promised and I thank the director for his constant and consistent support and encouragement I thank all the audience present here for your patience and for showing interest in this and yeah I also thank all the other staff and media IT department maintenance all of them who have made this event possible today thank you