 work in progress. So hopefully you'll be able to benefit from this discussion. Let me give some background to, you know, what we're doing here. My name is Joey. I'm a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship at SOAS. It started this year. And yeah, it's really exciting to be able to set up this series of webinars. And it's been really encouraging to see how many people have been excited to get involved in learning different aspects of linguists and people from all over the world, people from all kinds of backgrounds as well. So it's great that this first one gets to be Vijay, who happens to be not just a linguistic colleague, but also a friend of mine who I've known for quite a few years. We met, we're both started our research at Oxford several years ago. And at that point, Vijay was doing his master's on Khorosovikav, but his actual work with this language community dates back to 1999, when he first moved to the community in his role with Jesuits. He was involved in education there for a long time, learned the language and decided to get involved in collaborating with the community to help support in an effort to create orthography and literacy in the language. And that's what led to his interest in studying more of the language from a linguistic aspect, first focusing on the phonology of the language, which is very complex. And now currently he's near completion of his PhD or his D-FIL at Oxford, for which he got a DLP grant from the Angel Languages documentation program to do a large documentation project. So we'll hear about parts of that project today. I should mention that the focus of his dissertation is actually not on this topic. This is something that he's developing now. In addition to his dissertation work, he's focused on the grammar and the dissertation. I've been able to look at parts of that, and that's going to be really interesting for anyone interested in the syntax and morphology of languages in this part of the country. So VJ is going to be submitting his dissertation about a month from now, and it's been a very stressful year so far. So we're really grateful that he took the time to do this in addition to the research that he's focusing on mainly for his dissertation. So that dissertation should be out sometime next year for those who will be interested in the grammar and syntax. But today we're going to focus more on VJ's documentation project that he did with the Urusurika community, starting back in 2015 or 2016. That's still ongoing as the community continues to work on documenting their own language. So he'll share bits of that, but also reflect on sort of the impact that that's had and the questions that that project has sort of brought to the surface about the language and the identity in this community. So let me see if I can unmute you, VJ. Oops, I just mute and remove it. Sorry. Okay, unmuted. Great, sounds good. So with that, let me just say the other thing is that VJ will talk for about 40 minutes or so through the presentation. Since we're such a large group, we'll just ask for questions to be written into the chat. So feel free to write your questions in the chat anytime if you have questions. Then at the end with whatever time we have left in this hour together, I'll try to sort through and get to as many of your questions in the chat as possible for VJ to respond. So without further ado, VJ, why don't you go ahead and share with us what you have to share. Thanks, Joey. Can you hear me? Yes. Welcome, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you are. A very special welcome to all the members of the Urusurika community who are here. As we begin, I'd like to just say a few words of welcome in their own language. Can you hear me? I'd like to share my screen. Can you see my screen? Not yet. Just a minute. Joey, can you see my screen? No, I'm not sure. Not yet. Just a minute. Sorry. Sorry for that. The topic of webinar today is our sister identities, relationality and language documentation. This is the outline of today's talk. I will be talking first of all about language endangerment. And then I will go on to today's topic proper identities and relationality. And I'll explain this theme with two stories from the Urusurika community, the stories that we reflected on me and my collaborators when we were documenting the language. And then part three, I would speak about, I would like to speak about collaborative language documentation among the Urusurika community. First of all, I'd like to begin with this question. How many languages are there in the world? Many of you, my linguistic colleagues will know this, but just to reflect upon this question, there are 7,000 and 111 languages as of 2019. This is the big picture. 80% of the languages, 80% of people speak only 94 languages. That is only 1.34% of the languages. Whereas 98, almost 99% of the languages are spoken by only 20% of the people. So almost half the languages of the world have less than 10,000 speakers and almost 2.5 thousand languages are endangered. 360 languages have gone extinct since 1950. And every year, six languages are disappearing. So we may ask, so what? Why should we care? There are people who say that we need not care. This is a natural process of evolution languages die and new languages are born. So those languages that die, let them die. People like Kenan Malik, who is a popular columnist, British author says, speaking a language such as English, French or Spanish and discarding traditional habits can open up new worlds and it's often a ticket to modernity. And Malik continues, most languages die out not because they're suppressed, but native speakers themselves choose to kill their own languages for better life. And therefore, it's okay if the languages die. Reflecting this same attitude, a young Uso Aka father one day back in 1999 told me, what's the use of teaching a language to my son? It won't earn him his daily bread. He was going to teach his children Hindi and he was puzzled why I was actually learning his language when he himself was giving it up. So Malik continues and says, what if half the words languages are on the verge of extinction? Let them die in peace. Some of the answers to this question, why bother? I will be dwelling on this question throughout this webinar, but from current researchers and scholars, we know that loss of languages, loss of humanity, it's a knowledge system, a complete system in itself and every time we lose a language, we lose some of that. They're also repositories of culturally, ecological and historical and medical and geographical knowledge. We all know this and linguistically speaking, they tell us how language itself works. Therefore, each language gives insights into human language in general, but this position has been criticized as romanticizing Indigenous languages. It's an outsider's obsession, where as when the community itself doesn't want to preserve their language, why should we care outsiders? This has been criticized as purely a utilitarian view, just because languages are useful to us. Therefore, we must preserve this language, not very convincing. There are deeper reasons. Language, culture and ecology depend on each other. For example, linguistic and biological diversity are interconnected. For example, wherever there is biological diversity, there is also linguistic diversity. There is a lot of research going on right now in this area, but it's in early stages. So, dominant languages, from the social justice point of view, when the dominant language is imposed upon a minority, a language community, it becomes a tool of exclusion because only a few privileged will rise and everybody else will be suppressed. This creates language-induced poverty. This is relatively a new concept and a lot more research needs to be done in this area. And basically, language rights as a social justice issue. Are there also psychological, emotional and cultural reasons? For example, one important thing is people in the culture lose a sense of place, purpose and a path when they lose their language because their language is a repository of their own history and their local knowledge. Therefore, strong words have been used to describe this phenomenon as linguistic genocide. There is also some indication that language loss leads to mental health damage. When we had a recent seminar on orthography in 2017, a young Uso Aka leader stood up and told us publicly this. My parents gave me the best education, but I bear the shame of not knowing my language. So, it creates this kind of pain and regret in people who do not speak their own language. So, language loss is an abrupt uprooting from the past. It causes trauma and destroys the meaning system and leaves a word, especially for Indigenous communities. So, to summarize this, I would like to state that minority language speakers actually do not choose to give up their language because it is a very painful choice and they are pressured into making that choice. Coming to various responses to engagement, one attitude is okay, let them die in peace as Malik said, but there are other options. There is the possibility of documentation, language description and community mobilization and today I would like to speak about each of these aspects of response to engagement. In this section, I would like to give a little bit of introduction to Uso people and the land and language. Northeast India where Uso people live is language, linguistic diversity hotspot. You can see in the red circle how many languages are concentrated in that small area in India. This is the state of Arunachal Pradesh and in that state Uso people live in the West Kamang district in this area in three administrative circles called Trigino, Guraggaon, Jamiriya and Balupong. These are some of the photographs of our people in their traditional dress. In historical records, Uso Akas first appeared in the early British records in the 19th century. They were known for trading relationship with Assam and the neighboring indigenous tribes and when those relationships didn't go well, they were in the habit of repeated raids and therefore they came into conflicts with the British colonial structure. They had the rights to collect certain amount of taxes for perhaps for helping the local chieftains in warfare but when the British took over, they disallowed that and that left to conflict and their most famous historical figure is Thakiraja in Uso Thakje. He repeatedly rebelled against the British and conducted raids in the plains. He was imprisoned in 1829 and in 1832 he was released and from there he raided Badi Parra and there was a massacre of British outpost and then he was outlawed. Finally, there was a peace and then in 1873 Thakiraja died. The Uso people have had amicable relationship with the relationship with the plains people and with the Indian government ever since. As for the oral history, each clan has its own oral history. For example, the Buragao clans where I did my field work, these clans claim that they migrated from Assam. Since this talk is about linguistics and language, I do not have time to go into all the details. This is the Buragao or Hulubro village also people call this Hulubro and these are some of the fields. As you can see people practice slash and burn cultivation. They depend on the forest around them for their sustenance and then among the forest the villages are situated in the forest and then the fields are also in the forest. They clear a small pot and then cultivate. This is the traditional dance. The Uso Aqa traditional dress. Nabi Dusso, the vice president of the community. In this photo we have four generations of Uso Aqas in one photo. You can see the little one there behind the grandmother. This video is a small glimpse of the village life. Just a small introduction to the language itself. There are between three to four thousand speakers of Uso Aqa today. There's a rapid language shift to Hindi and it's definitely threatened and classified as a 6B language on aged scale. It is Van Dream says it's endangered with imminent extinction within a generation or two. There are questions about its affiliation. I would not like to make any definitive statement about this. I have a feeling that it's definitely a Tibetan language but research is still going on because of its very unique nature where I will come to that later. It's difficult to determine its affiliation still. It's definitely different from neighboring languages and its fricative phonology has been noted since the early 20th century. I would like to demonstrate some of those sounds. Harrison says it's a fabulously complex language with wicked tongue twisters. If you hear that these words ktskring or tukka you can hear the vowels are almost whispered. So this language has lots of consonants clustered and clusters and also in between there are whispered vowels, devoiced vowels. That's why it sounds as it does ktskring for example. This is a tongue twister for you. This goes like this. And this is the phonemic transcription of it and this is the phonetic transcription. This is a made-up sentence and it means this. I come to the part two of this webinar presentation. How do also people see themselves? I feel very humbled and honored to speak about this topic on behalf of the community. And this definitely is not my work alone. It is these insights have been gathered from the collaborative field work that I have been doing with the community members. So the stories and the reflections belong to them as well as me. So I'd like to refine three terms here. First of all identity is anthropologically speaking. There's a lot of debate about this term but I would like to take this very simple definition. Identity is who we are in relation to others socially, culturally and biologically. And as a linguist I can't help thinking in terms of contrast and I would like to also highlight this aspect who we are in contrast with others. What is unique about us and what sets us apart from others? This is the question of identity. Relationality is the web of relationships that connects humans, spirits, plants, animals and other entities in the cosmos. And language documentation, I take Himmelman's definition. Those who are familiar with language documentation are familiar with this definition. It's concerned with methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties. I will explain this definition as we go along. Also, Akkas have a strange custom and I would like to speak to you about this custom. That is when a child is born they immediately call out a name. The belief being if you do not give it a name first then the spirits will give it a name and claim the child as their own. Therefore you must give a name to the child as soon as it's born. But that's not the most interesting part. The interesting part is this. Once the name is given then a child must choose its own name. This sounds very strange but it's true. On the fourth day or any appointed day the parents and the relatives will come around the child and since the name that is given as soon as the child is born is given by someone else, now it's the child's responsibility and the privilege to choose its own name. So they utter different names. The child obviously cannot speak and they give a coin or some other materials. Different people use different materials for this. Nowadays they use coins or currency notes and put it in the hands of the child. If the child holds whatever is given, whatever's name is uttered and as soon as the name is uttered, if the child holds that currency note or coin then the name sticks. That means the child has chosen its name. If not the child has rejected the name. So this process can go on and on and my friend Laby the other day told me his child naming ceremony was quite a tedious one. It almost dragged on for a month because the child was not accepting any name that was given to it. So this may look strange but there is a reason behind it and the reason can be discovered by analyzing this story. So I'd like to share this story with you. The story is titled section the spirit, his clever daughter and the dumb son-in-law. So once upon a time there was this human being and this spirit and the spirit gave his daughter in marriage to the human being, his name was Humo Thulevo and then the spirit started regretting what have I done? I have given my daughter in marriage to this man. So I must get my daughter back and I must also get the man's land for myself and therefore he goes to the man and tries to trick him into various competitions and he says okay let's have a competition and if I win my land belongs to you, if you win your land belongs to me and the spirit thinks since I'm I am more powerful than him, I will definitely win. The daughter knows about this and then she advises the husband and every time there's a competition held the husband wins and finally the spirit gets exasperated and he says okay let's go fishing, this competition is not working so let's go fishing and they go fishing and there he tries to trick him again. All right the water is too shiny let's remove our eyelashes and keep it on a stone here and the spirit pretends as if it's taking out its eyelashes and then man also does the same and he sends the man downstream you go downstream and you fish there, I will fish here as soon as the man goes downstream he eats up the eyelashes and the human being gets very sick. This is interesting because in Uso Aka world view if you lose your bodily integrity you are bound to become sick then there is a whole commotion and finally the daughter goes to her father and requests him do not trouble my husband I love him therefore you need to give his health back and the spirit uses this opportunity to teach his daughter and human being you can see how ambiguous this whole nature of the spirit is the spirit teaches the human being about domestic animals and the wild animals about the sacrifices what part of this sacrificial animal should be given to the priest and what is to be distributed among the villages what part could be kept by human being etc and what are the plants that could be used for sacrifices you know making the sacrificial altar etc and from that day this whole ceremonies and rituals came into being what do we learn from this story what do we gather from this story I'd like to share the screen again so the story doesn't state about the whole cosmology of the Uso Akas but this is how this is what we can gather first of all Uso Aka world view sees the entire cosmos as being divided into different realms so there is Shappumnulu for example the spirit realm there is Nettro and Nettro and the earth no and Sijibro no where human beings dwell huda-puda the realm of the mountains and what water and mountains some be at the forest nezu the sky where realm of the cursed souls chik-jeneps the realm of the dead and there is interaction between different beings of different realms and the whole cosmic balance exists because of this interaction and just like there was imbalance and then there was suffering when the spirit tries to try to grab the man's land so whenever this balance is and there is chaos and there is also the inner circle of the self and around the self there is Nettro husband wife children and domestic animals and there's Nettro the village clan and the fields etc so back to the naming ceremony so I asked the question why is this this may look a strange ceremony but this goes back to that story because this is based on a concept of the realms and beings the human being any human child must be claimed by a community as its own by giving a name and then it becomes fully human so therefore I belong therefore I am this is the basis of human identity in Uso Aka if you do not belong if you do not have a clan if you do not have a family if you do not have a village if you do not have a land you have no identity then again a child must use must choose its own name and the child for example even when the child is born it is seen as a free human agent therefore it has freedom to choose its own name then once it chooses its name it cannot blame anyone else I have seen people you know when children complain when children complain why did you give me this name parents smiling and saying you chose that name this kind of thing so Uso Akas are very independent people very democratic and they value freedom and responsibility greatly the second story is orchid our sister there were I will I'm running short of time I will briefly narrate this story there were two sisters and an elder brother and the elder brother had a wife one day the elder brother had to go to the plains of Assam and the sister-in-law started persecuting the two sisters and there was terrible domestic abuse and finally she kills the two sisters it's a very tragic story but the two sisters who who are killed they become orchids one is called the Chucho the other one is Shumrodze these orchids are very dear to the Uso Akas they the Chucho is very common and we can see it right now in this season blooming everywhere Shumrodze is a very sweet smelling orchid and it's quite rare I do not know Chucho is a dendrobium species and Shumrodze I do not know we have not been able to ascertain his its scientific name as yet so once they become orchids there is further persecution that the sister-in-law tries to kill those plants as well but then the orchids go and wait on the path when the brother returns and the brother sees the flowers and he says oh these are beautiful flowers and I would like to pluck them and give it to my give them to my sister then as he is plucking the sister's cry out brother don't touch us it hurts we are your sisters and they narrate the whole story and the brother is very sad he goes home and he is heartbroken and eventually he goes to the field and he sees that the sisters are invisible but they are doing all the field work for their brother they are sowing the seeds and they're helping out with the field work but they are not visible so he knows that the sisters are invisible and they're there so he tries to run around and try to trying to recognize their footsteps and try to cast them but that is not possible then finally the sisters say all right we can't help you if you're trying to if you're mourning our loss all the time and trying to cling on to us now we are very different so we will go and dwell on the tree and from there we will help you and from today onwards we will indicate when you have to sow your seeds and your agricultural season begins and even to this day in the village people look at these orchids and when they are in bloom they start their field work and and that's the story in short from the story we gather this although it's a tragic story humans are intimately related to naturally entities who are considered the tiger as their brother orchid at their sister and the hawk as their uncle they watch over us protect us and sustain us from the two stories we can gather these fundamental insights first of all there's a cosmic balance of dynamic interrelationality there is suffering disease and calamity when the balance is lost the balance is restored only when every being gets is due and justice is restored and mythology for example is a narrative web that holds all these meaning systems together mythologies encode people's sense of identity and they explain the place of everything in the universe so I would like to revisit the question now this why bother we asked this question right in the beginning I hope the answer is becoming clear now the whole system meaning system and the world view is an interrelated web for any culture whether it's an indigenous culture or any other culture there's there are mythologies oral history world view rituals rites of passage customs dress festival food these are all connected in a one big interconnected whole but languages at the center because language is the one which holds everything together the words of a language are not nearly words they are meanings that a person has heard from childhood they create these words create pathways in the in the brains they connect emotionally and each word speaks very powerfully when you utter them in your mother tongue but when the language is lost there is this void in the center and without that strong center all these meaning making systems cannot remain connected and the entire system will be wiped out slowly the concept will still remain but they are still they're just ghosts of their formal selves and they are no longer interconnected this is the tragedy of language loss so prevent this tragedy what can what can be done what can we do one way of preventing language loss is language documentation I would like to discuss what we are doing among the also akas very briefly now again I would emphasize that this has been a collaborative usawaka language documentation I thank all my team members whoever most of them are listening today it is because of you this has been possible and a big thanks to all of you I have learned so much from you and from the entire usawaka community thank you the my association with the usawaka community began in 1999 as Joey said at the beginning of this talk and language documentation started in 2015 Peter Austin explains the five steps of language documentation as follows there is first step is recording and then we recording is obvious either video or audio recording then we transfer the recorded data into our computers and then we transcribe translate annotate add metadata etc unfortunately I don't have time to go into all these details but I will just briefly explain in the next slides then the material entire data is archived so that native speaker community can access these archived material and use use it for their own language purposes finally there is language description and community mobilization I would like to briefly dwell on all the steps first types of recording uh in Himmelman's definition we saw that it has to be multipurpose and different samples of usawaka language data so we collected various samples like sacred stories wordless oral history searching for wild tubers simply a group chatter when people are going to the jungle to forage for food traditional dance a conversation on women's status another sacred dance we also recorded a live meeting when it was taking place in the village weaving and explanation of how weaving is done a basket weaving session simply an evening fireside chat an archery competition and hunting and many more genre of recording the the point being the recording has to be multipurpose and multi uh involving multi uh faceted data of course there is always this linguistic illustration I would like to demonstrate some of the videos now this is you can see two men uh just weaving a basket uh jumping from one topic to the other this is a very natural sample of the language this is this is gathering wild tubers uh you can see the lady digging out that huge uh wild cuba and returning from that a tradition um easy So we have some cool recordings now what the next step is next steps are like transferring adding value and archiving that I just mentioned from Peter Austin's Five Steps. This is how the final product looks like after we transcribe. We are also working on a Osoaka dictionary. We already have a corpus, I mean 3,500 words and the word list is growing by the day and then we finally find the final step of language documentation not the final the fourth step is archiving and the data is archived at ELAR Endangered Languages Archive as well as London. Then comes language description. I would like to just give one example Osoaka has very very strange sounding choral consonants, consonantal complexity and we undertook a study of palletography using this ladder forgets method of using charcoal to paint people's mouth and identifying the places of articulation and we found four places of articulation and that really immensely helped us in classifying these and categorizing these sounds and that is analyzed into features how features are like how brain and vocal apparatus process processes sounds and then from there we make this made this list and then finally it is distilled down to orthography the writing system. Next step is community mobilization. The first book in Osoaka was in 1999 and from there we have come a long way. This was the first text book in 2005 and 2012 new Noosa or beautiful songs and a mobile dictionary under development but also a smaller version has been released already. The leaders of Osoaka Elite Society have been very encouraging and we published a storybook in 2018 and this is our Oso website in a rudimentary form we are planning to strengthen it further and this alphabet chart was released last year and there are signs of hope for the language. We formed also a literature team in 2017 and the team is working towards language promotion and language revitalization and producing literature in the language original literature. And these are our language warriors enthusiastic youngsters and also elders who have been constant companions in this work. So in conclusion indigenous languages encode ways of living in harmony with nature which most of the world has already forgotten. For example Osoa see themselves as related related to the orchid the tiger the hawk and other living beings not in a metaphorical sense but in a real sense. The stories tell us about how they derive their identity from their land their forests and their relatedness to animals birds and plants. In their worldview each being has its own realm and is in a given take relationship with other beings. When such relationships are respected there is harmony when these are disturbed there is suffering and chaos and that worldview is encoded in their language and when the language is destroyed their entire worldview will crumble and this will have devastating consequences for their meaning system. But I'd like to end on a note of hope through language documentation through the community support community involvement this language documentation empowers the native speaker community by preserving their language and thus preserving their identity and meaning systems. Thanks to all these people and many more thanks to ELDP and all these people and organizations that supported me. These are some of the references finally thank you for your patient listening. Great thank you so much Vijay I'm sure we didn't have to be patient it was all really interesting and great to just get some insight into the work you've been doing that the community's been doing and really a good picture of the language grounded in what's actually happening in the society and in the culture and the atmosphere as well. We've got a few questions and so feel free to add your questions to the chat we've got about 10 minutes to see if we can get Vijay to talk a little bit more about whatever you're interested in hearing about. The first questions were really about more of the question about the relationship between identity and society so one question was if language and identity are somehow linked shouldn't language evolve with the identity so maybe if I can elaborate on that question if you so you had your chart of showing you know what happens when the local language disappears and the hole it leaves couldn't say Hindi evolve to fill that hole and be used in that function in that society yeah so maybe you can elaborate a bit more about your what you're thinking of in terms of this relationship between language and identity and how that changes and evolves over time. Yeah sure thank you thanks for this question one thing I must say at the outset is I'm not recommending any exclusivistic you know any ideology here I'm not saying people should not learn any other language only their local native languages no that's that's not the idea what's important is they're rooted in their own language and that helps people to root themselves in their own identities I think during the presentation I've connected identities language and identity in the sense that why your own heritage language is important because there are concepts and words that are not present in other languages so let's take the example of Hindi for example Hindi Hindi is the mainland Indian language North Indian language and learn it by all means no problem but when you give up your mother tongue and you learn Hindi and replace your mother tongue with it you're not you're not familiar with the concepts and the worldview and the roots of that language so so the native Hindi speakers from UP or Bihar have centuries old advantage over over you in that sense so you're not perfect there and you're not perfect in your own language because you have given up your own native language so this is the whole dynamic that goes on there of course being a speaker of Hindi you can evolve your own identity eventually but that will take generations it will take three or four generations but you'll have to begin with the generation which has lost its own root and that is always a very traumatic process okay thanks there's one other question that's on the same lines maybe a bit of a philosophical one just read the statement here I believe that language is part of identity not the other way around what's your proof that identity is part of language again I think just pushing more in this this concept of how we view identity and language is language a part of identity or identity part of language or does that not make any sense to have a discussion in that way at all do you have any response to that yeah I I don't know how to respond to that because it's a it's a chicken and egg question actually again identities evolve over time I had a nice story about a current you know evolving myths about Thage Raja but I ran out of time so I wanted to discuss this question actually you've got five minutes so give us your five-minute overview of that that question I think I think I need more than that so maybe yeah I would say that I mean one one full I can't even say depends on the other they are definitely interrelated so but there is no clear cut distinction on which is you know which I wouldn't like to make that distinction I mean perhaps part of the question was the issue of contrast you brought up and that if you do even if you can say evolve to express certain concepts in another language then you lose the sense of contrast with those who don't have that language but anyway I'm sure it's a much more complex issue let me ask one more question that just popped up here I'll just read the question there is a greater in-depth spiritual cultural identity that our mother tongue holds therefore I ask if one individual does not speak his or her language and does not know his or her culture anymore rather they are westernized then do we consider them truly of that ethnicity so as things change of the generation so in my own example my great-great grandparents were in the region I don't know the language or culture anymore because they immigrated so am I still do I still have that ethnicity oh is it a black and white question or yeah how does what happen yeah yeah yeah I would say this I mean I was talking specifically about indigenous communities there's a difference between people who migrate out of their own choice to another culture and then they sort of make their culture their own that is completely a different process altogether and I specifically concentrated on indigenous languages and communities and in this context what happens is there's an invasion of another language into into their own area there is not people out of their free will moving on to different area and I wouldn't I wouldn't like to go into that question at all because that's not my area of expertise and I've not observed that phenomenon closely but this is a question of dominant language invasion through various means and methods people being pressurized to give up their own language so I am specifically focusing on that situation here yeah so there's definitely yeah power dynamics have to be considered in different contexts yeah definitely yes yeah yeah all right we'll go with these last two questions so one question is what kinds of challenges did you face while working with Hrusoka and yeah did you discover something through those challenges that changed your perspective on language documentation and language endangerment yes go ahead and answer that question and then I have one final one for you after yeah I just saw that question I think is from Meenakshi Singh about changing my you know yeah whether my field work experience changed my perspective yeah definitely so I'd like to recall one particular experience that I had I was when I went there I had already worked with the Hrusoka community for about 17 years so I thought I I know the culture quite well by then and I was practically I was the sort of expert there deciding on what to record because I had this you know linguist perspective and I was recording certain things then suddenly an idea came to me why not show these recording to people various recordings to people and get their feedback and that was a shocking experience for me because before asking them I identified four of my favorite recordings and I showed about 20 recordings to them asked them to grade those recordings and only only one of my favorite recording was chosen as their favorite three of them were completely different so that shocked me because I realized that I need a sort of change of course here and then so that was a turning point in my documentation then we started discussing more about what we could record and also I started more training native speaker collaborators more and more so that they can bring their perspective inside and they have corrected me many times when I said this is important they would have they have told me no no no not this this is the most important thing here so I've been yeah this is one of the most important experiences I had I would say okay the last question I'll ask is can you share with us what the community's next steps are for working with the language are they still doing documentation is there literacy are there creative linguistic activities they're working on yeah Akayali society has given us a mandate to produce literature and we are we are not only documenting the language we will continue to document the language because now there are lots of my collaborators are trained in this so this is the best time they are sensitive to what is important what is not important in the language so they will carry on that work but at the same time we are we are going to produce original literature we have already composed a couple of poems and we are in the process of making about five textbooks in the coming three years or so so this work will go on the next year I think we have we have a plan to introduce the language as a subject in the schools next by next year these are small steps but you know that's the plan right so we'll end there I'll just make a few comments before ending this meeting a couple people have asked it if this is going to be available online we're not planning to make this talk available online so you probably won't find it anywhere but if people do want to follow up vj what's the best way for them to get in touch with you if they have more questions or want to share material or follow up with you perhaps email would be the best way which one are you willing to share yeah this was uh do you have that one you can tell me I'll type it into the chat yeah d s o u yeah uh just a minute z a d s o u z a v dot ac yeah at gmail.com this is a v dot ac at gmail.com yeah that's right okay and I think uh also on twitter at vj linguist people want to keep the conversation going there as well thank you so much for your time for being willing to share with us I wish you the best of luck with your submission coming up as well and your plan return to the community this year we hope that goes well I'm sure lots of people are excited to see you in India again but thank you so much for sharing with us thank you for everyone coming out to participate and hanging out with us for this hour really encouraging and I hope this has been inspiring encouraging for you and whatever kinds of linguistics you're doing or whatever you're doing with language in your life uh outside of the academic world thank you so much for being a part of this thank you again vj thanks thanks Joey thanks everyone all right goodbye everyone thank you bye