 So good afternoon, and welcome to the departmental seminar. I will introduce the two speakers today. Five speakers, I'll check. Sorry? Five speakers, but never mind. Oh, sorry. Julia Salabank, you've probably seen them already, the two pillars of the LDD program at SOAS. So Julia is the revitalization person, but really she's a sociolinguist by training. She's interested in, of course, not only revitalization, but language policy, language planning, literacy practices in endangered languages. And she's done a lot of fieldwork in the Channel Islands, Guernsey, and what else should I say about you? I also want to introduce, I also want to introduce Peter Austin, who is just here, is the chair of the merit rising, it's called chair merit browsing in field linguistics here at SOAS. So he's interested in historical linguistic typology and, of course, in the documentation description of endangered languages. He's done extensive fieldwork in Australia. He can tell you himself for how long. And also in Indonesia, there are partner presenters here. Yes, yes. Should I introduce you as well? Well, we can do that in a minute. OK. We're just very sorry that we were a bit late because you were getting this together still, and too that this machine is not working yet. So in the meantime, I'll introduce our co-presenters. You'd like to stand up? OK. So this is Sam Goodchild. Albert, what's your surname? Madoza. Madoza. Yes. And Ebonidola, who are PhD students and a new MA student here at SOAS, who took part in one of the events organized by this Engage Humanities Project, which is a field school in Mexico just a few weeks ago, or months ago, and even now, got time flies. OK. Ebonidola had. Ebonidola had. Well, Ebonidola had to use our project administrator. OK. So I think I'm going to start talking about it while this keeps, oh dear, while it prepares our desktop. OK. So the Engage Humanities Project. OK. Two of my first settings. OK. So the Engage Humanities Project is a European Union-founded project under a scheme called Horizon 2020, Twinning, which is originally, the original idea was that it supports capacity building in former Eastern Bloc universities, so in universities in Eastern Europe. So they have to have two partners in Western Europe. So those partners are ourselves and Leiden University, Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Latin American Studies, and the Department of Archaeology as well is a transdisciplinary project. And our chief PI, principal investigator in Warsaw, Yutina Olko, has negotiated with the European Union that we can not only benefit members of her university, but also members of indigenous groups, minority groups, people who were involved in both documenting and campaigning for regional and minority languages. Right. OK. So it's called Engage Humanities in Europe because it's funded by the European Union. But in fact, we're trying to have an effect way out well outside Europe as well. OK. As I mentioned here, so I am the principal investigator for so as Peter is my co-principal investigator. And I meant to add Bonita to this slide, but we didn't have time. Ebony is our project administrator. We have to so as, the whole grant is 1 million euros, which is quite a lot of money, of which so as gets about a fifth. Most of that is actually going to pay Ebony. But also, there's also travel expenses. And a smaller proportion of that goes to pay part of Peter and my salaries. And we don't always actually see a lot of it for the project. OK. So in this, this is in the wrong place, we're going to give introductions, done that already, overview of the project. And we're going to talk about some of the activities that we've done as part of the project and also talk about some of the issues that have arisen as part of the project and discuss what we might perhaps do or address about some of them. So the main objectives, as I said, a multidisciplinary capacity building. We also want to try and develop strategies for language revitalization. So language revitalization is a major part of the project, not just language documentation, including methodologies and curricula for teaching minority languages. The idea is to incorporate methodologies of participatory action research and community-based participatory research based on direct participation of local groups as stakeholders and partners. This is, as you've done, applied language documentation. We'll note this is part of the ongoing discussion within the field of language documentation. And the idea is to basically curate spaces for marginalized groups in Europe and beyond to get that research, explore their agency, and also make links between different minority groups in different parts of the world. So our main activities we have conducted are quite a number of seminars and workshops in Warsaw. We'll be continuing to do so. One of the first things we did was a summer school at SOWAS. There have been field schools in Poland and in Mexico and another summer school in Leiden. There's going to be a major international conference later this year in Warsaw, which Peter and I are going to be keynote speakers. There's going to be some more fieldwork training in the Island of Man, which is an interesting example of language revitalization here. And we also wanted to highlight that we are actually responsible for this money that we've managed to get. So we have to report back regularly to the EU in Brussels and we had to have a meeting with them earlier this year and probably have to have another one next year as well. That meeting actually went really well. They were really pleased with how this project is progressing and they particularly commented that we're collaborating very well with our Polish colleagues. Not all of these projects actually have such genuine collaboration between people in Eastern and Western Europe. So we're going to talk about a lot of these more in detail. So I will go on without more ado because we're late already. I didn't want that. So there are participants from at least 15 countries that this slide was prepared for the presentation to the European Union in Brussels in May and there'd be more since then, including El Salvador, which isn't on this map. At least 22, or more, at least 25, banal minority languages, including Wimmy Serish, which is a minority language, a Germanic language in the south of Poland, and various other regional minority languages in Poland. Genesee, my own language in Guernsey, the Isle of Man. We've had participants from there and as I said, we'll be having other field school there. We're also going to be having another field study in Northern Norway, in Samila, Asapila, Asadmi. We have participants from bus country in Spain, especially one of our former students here, some of you may know, I don't know if you've been yet. My son's name now, Garayu. We've also, particularly in the summer school in London, this olheti project, which Candid is involved in, did a presentation and also a field visit. Particularly though, there's a focus on working in Mexico because our colleagues in Poland and also our colleagues in Leiden have a particular focus on working with indigenous groups in Mexico. And for the field school in Mexico, this time, links are made with Ebony's work in El Salvador with a related language group. And also, we've made links with a group in Guyana. Peter, would you like to do this one, please? Okay, so I'm just going to review some of the activities that we did in the last year. There's a lot of detail here, and I'll kind of go through it fairly rapidly. We'll make the slides available later because I think the later discussion where we raise issues and problems and so on are probably more interesting. Let me just sort of re-emphasize what Julia was saying is that although this is an EU-funded project, we actually have participants from all over the world and particularly drawing together Latin American colleagues and European colleagues. So we had a summer school here in June last year on trans-disciplinarity, so bringing people from different disciplines together, looking at language identity and revitalization, colleagues from the Institute of Education as it then was. This is a party project that Candide and Marie have been leading together with the Sorma community up in Camden who came down and participated. A former PhD student, Birgul, introduced the Kurdish issues. Federica talked about Senegal. We had a former MA student, Jenny Needs. You see, you never escape from this department. You become a student and we get you back. And then Justina, who's our Polish colleague, talked about what's going on in Villa Mavica, which you'll hear more about in a few minutes. Alongside this, we ran some practical training, hands-on practical training. And Tom Castle, who used to be here at SOS, is now independently running training courses and research methods, so we ran some of that. And that was quite an eye-opening experience, particularly for our Mexican colleagues in terms of thinking about good processes for doing recordings and processing them. Second major activity was the field school in Villa Mavica, which is a town in the southeastern part of Poland that has been a Germanic speaking area for many hundreds of years. And Julia was one of the people who went to that one. Okay, so how the field schools have tended to run so far is that they are split up into groups, working groups, and the groups are organised so that they are international, there's a mixture of language backgrounds, and there's a mixture of local people and people from various other countries. And people with varying levels of experience as well in field work. And the topics that we worked on there were firstly field researchers as a group I was in, documenting another, they're even smaller language. Villa Mavica itself, sorry, is a town with about 3,000 people, but, and its own language, Villa Misurish, now has only probably about 20 speakers. All but one of them are about age 80 plus. The youngest native speaker is in his 20s, and he spearheaded a lot of revitalisation work. But there are other Germanic language islands in the area. So this other little town called Halsnow has its own language which was thought to have only four speakers all age over 80. We actually found another one as part of this research. And we did about three hours of recording, and some of the PhD students from Poland are going to be carrying on doing that. I don't think Sophie is here today. One of our former PhD students, Sophie Mu, was involved in group two, attitude research in villages in the surrounding area. There's a long history of negative attitudes towards Villa Misurish, particularly in the surrounding area, but particularly after the Second World War, when the Russians took over and the Communists took over, they were very obviously anti the Germanic speakers who were perceived, although not actually to have been possibly collaborating in lots of non-linguistic stuff going on in language discrimination. Third group was developing educational materials and the fourth group was developing the concept of a living museum, which I'll come back to later. And these are pretty pictures of the area surrounding Villa Misurish. We made a documentary of the field school, so we're documenting what was going on as part of the thinking process. Give the word to Timmek, who is like the spirit of the revitalization, the whole revitalization of Villa Misurish. Timmek Krull. Timmek gave me an MSU and with that MSU, all things don't see over. Another part doesn't have MSU, but that's the MSU. There are basically four groups that were intended for this field school, and there are not many of us here at Villa Movice that are working with the problem, and we are always struggling with time. So it is also the case of this field school. The four groups are designed in this way so that they would respond to the biggest challenges in revitalizing Villa Misurish right now. So your work will help us later to revitalize the language and to understand better the whole environment. The worst, what is for the Villa Movice people, is that the worst things have done the people from surrounding villages. When the Soviet Army came here and they asked, are there Germans? If there are Germans, you can take their houses and we will kill them. So the people from surrounding villages said, yeah, we know where are Germans. This is like a crucial passage from it. From now on we ban any use of the local dialect, also in family and private situations. The foregoing concerns also wearing distinct folk costumes. Those who do not comply with the present ban will be brought to severe punishment since it is the high time to put stop to any distinctness and its lamentable result. And one of the testimonies was probably most significant to my impression of what had happened in Villa Movice. People like prayed mountains and hills, please cover us up. We want to be hidden, we want to be invisible. Okay, I'm going to stop that there. I'll come back to this later. This is actually a meeting of the Parliamentary Commission that I'll talk about later. I think we need to get back to the main presentation now. Okay, there's been quite a lot of publicity for the language in Villa Movice as part of this. And there's a local theatre group. As vitalisation through performance is quite an important part of the approach that these people are promoting. There's a theatre group, composed of very young people actually. This guy here is the lead actor in one of the plays that they put on. He's only 17 and he's actually an excellent actor. They've got some wonderful singers. Let's see. No, that's not it. Sorry, I thought that was a little video thing. I've got video of this play if you're interested. What they did, first of all, they translated two well-known international pieces of literature. First, all the little prints, secondly, The Hobbit, into Limisirish. But what they've done most recently is to adapt a play, or actually a long poem, originally written in Limisirish by an exiled local person about 100 years ago, which is itself based on Dante's Divine Comedy. So you see sort of both semi-traditional sort of cultures going round and round, if you like, circulating around the world. But we were being really, really impressed by the quality of the theatrical performances they put on. And they were invited to put both The Hobbit and The Next World on a major theatre in Warsaw, in the capital of Poland. And I think this is a measure of the impact of the language of vitalisation in Wielomibice, that I said to them, what other young people's theatre group from a small town in southern Poland would get this opportunity to put on their play in a major theatre in the capital. So this is something they can say, this is actually our language that has done this, not just any other theatre group. Okay, I'm going to turn it back to Peter now, because he knows more about the summer school than I do. Julia, just before I do that, Julia mentioned the young chap there, the 17-year-old who's participating in the plays. Tim Ek, who is the youngest speaker of Wielomibice language, has an amazing story. When he was 12 years old, he got interested in his history and so on. And he started to learn the language from his grandmother. And he started making recordings. He got an old cassette recorder, and he now has 800 hours of interviews with all his aunts and uncles and grandmother and so on. And he is the most fluent new speaker of this language. He's now 23, I think. Yeah, he's doing an MA, I think. And he's now studying at the university, and the plan is for him to learn the skills that he needs to continue his language activism. Some of the students were joking with him that he's been told by his supervisor that he must not eat at McDonald's, because the future of Wielomibice is with him. Got to say that. Yes, to say that. OK, so third activity that we mentioned was in June this year. A bunch of us went to Leiden, and there was a summer school hosted by the University of Leiden. Much bigger than the one here at SOAS. We had about 50 participants, students and staff from the three partner universities, from a whole range of different backgrounds. We're not just linguists. It's also involves archaeologists, anthropologists, education specialists, historians, philosophers, computer science and the arts, because we want to bring in the whole notion of performance as an important part of revitalization and documentation. And the focus was more on revitalization and collaborative ethical research practice with how transdisciplinarity working across and within disciplines is both a challenge and an opportunity for us. So what happens when archaeologists and linguists want to work together in terms of issues of the diverse disciplinary backgrounds and the different goals that people coming from different disciplines might have? There were indigenous participation involving Latin America, heritage languages in the Netherlands and Suriname, a former Dutch colony and Turkic languages in Ukraine. So you know Ukraine, the Crimean area that was grabbed by the Russians recently, there are Turks, people speaking Turkic languages there, and we had engagement with participants from that area. There are a series of lectures by indigenous academics and activists on revitalization. So the picture here actually shows a colleague from Mexico who gave his presentation in Ayoc, which is his language, and we had translation of that then into Spanish and into English. So he made a point which was he could give his talk, academic presentation in his own language and engage with issues. So it's not that we're working on the languages, but the languages and the indigenous participants are fundamental as partners. There was a hands-on workshop run at the beautiful botanical gardens in Leiden. If you ever go to Leiden, please make sure you go there. Ideally, take Condit and Ebony and some of the poor group from SOAS because they ran a hands-on workshop there on ethnobotany and also a bunch of lectures and issues of theoretical and philosophical and more less hands-on kinds of issues. One thing we did do was a poster, display and competition, and this was done out of doors in the plaza at the university. You can see the one that you can see in the front here is the connection between language revival amongst Maya-speaking groups and the farming practices having to do with corn. So the fundamental linkage between language and agricultural practices in that case. And this was done in a public space so that we had people walking through and having a look at the posters and engaging with the groups as well. And so that was followed up in August by the Second Field School run in Mexico and our three participants here are going to tell you about that. So we went to Mexico between the 18th and 31st of August and we went to this little point here. It's called Tlaxcala. It's about one and a half to two hour drive away from the city by bus. There were approximately 45 participants who attended the field school. It was divided half and half representatives from Mexican communities and other half representatives of European universities. It's worthwhile noting that some of the representatives from European universities were also Mexican. So it's kind of representing academia and knowledge from Europe. The languages of communication during the field school were Nahuatl, Spanish and Polish sometimes. And the idea was to also create a space where Nahuatl would be spoken in the public domain. The idea was for all participants to have hands-on experience in field work and language documentation. And for there to be discussions and presentations from members of the language community on the topics that we uncovered and discussed. So some of the aims were to have successful knowledge transfer between Mexican revitalization initiatives and the European ones. And this was done by creating audio and video materials and hands-on field-based research which included conducting interviews, eliciting data and managing research expectations. As I mentioned before, there was a creation of health spaces for the use of Nahuatl, particularly on a more formal setting. And there was knowledge transfer in exchange for local activists at national and regional levels. So it was interesting to have participants from all over Mexico, people who represented different language minorities and also who represented different varieties of Nahuatl as well as the fact that this was the first time that representatives from Nahuatl in El Salvador were able to meet with Nahuatl speakers of Mexico. So some of the knowledge transfer was, like I mentioned, audio and video documentation techniques. So how do I go about making a good quality audio recording? How do I go about making a good quality video recording management of teamwork? Everything was divided into... We were all divided into groups and we had to learn how to communicate with each other and set research goals as a team. We were asked to create multimodal materials to promote language revitalization. So how do we use the materials collected to create materials that would be useful to the community? And then we discussed what it means to document and revitalize the language, sharing perspectives from within the community and from outside the community. And in particular it was interesting to note how assumptions of Nahuatl, because we were working with Nahuatl, how this assumption of there is a language of wider communication and if we all speak it, that means we all speak the same variety. But actually through the discussions it was found out that there were some varieties of Nahuatl weren't mutually intelligible with other varieties and actually this made the speakers themselves more aware of some of the underlying attitudes. So we were divided into groups as I said. There were six working groups and there were between seven and nine participants per group. And some of the themes that were just covered were documentation of culture and linguistic heritage. There were two groups that covered this topic and linguistic attitudes and language planning, creation of pedagogical materials and then a group that focused on creating theater performance for the benefit of language revitalization and then a group that focused on the well-being of the community. So Albert and I both worked on language documentation although in different groups and then Sam worked on language attitudes. So I was group one. We documented cultural and linguistic heritage. This was done through eight semi-structured interviews on the topic of culture over five days. Some of the themes that emerged were the traditional weaving practices, dying of textiles and wills, preparing traditional foods and traditional agricultural practices. We were asked to create audiovisual documentation and we were also asked to do some data management although this was actually left for a later stage. And then at the end we were told to create educational materials using the material we had collected. So in my opinion the materials we created weren't actually that good because the overall goals of what we were doing weren't said explicitly at the beginning. So what we ended up doing was creating a sing-along song using one of the videos that we had made and then using this video we created a two-minute how-to video to explain how to make guaraches which is a type of food that is eaten in Mexico. And then to supplement this we created a two-hour lesson plan to accompany the instructional video. I think. So in my case I worked with group two and we also did documentation. So in our case we were supposed to work in a community that was not really engaged with us, was a little bit apart. And the selection of the topics we wanted to address was up to us. So the problem was that we had only half an hour to select the topics and we end up with kind of strange anthropological linguistic topics such as the legends on the group origin and the local volcano called Maninsin. Also the linguistic ideologies. Also the food cycle and the agriculture. The milpa which is like a house called Comfield and Garden which every Mexican has in that region. And then we also worked with group six one day because one community withdrew so we had to change a little bit the program. So we also interviewed women qua about well-being. Also we had in our group we had an archaeologist from Leiden so from the field work we and Kim did in Leiden. And he was really interested to ask about the old religion, so the old gods so the pre-catholic religion that they had. But the problem was that this topic was cancelled by the interview with themselves because they said we are Catholic, we are not going to talk about this we believe in one God. So that is one of the problems that we had that we are going to address to like Leiden. So I was in group three and we worked on language attitudes and we were meant to be doing language planning as well. In contrast to the other groups we did actually have quite a small group there was only five or six of us and we had a nicely organized group leader who assigned us all strict roles. And in a way I suppose we were lucky in that we mainly carried out our research using qualitative methods and we also approached it with a thematic analysis at the end. And we did our research through the methods using semi-structured interviews. And we kept to the same themes throughout the interviews as well. So we weren't chopping and changing which meant that we actually had some nice data at the end that we could compare together. The whole field school and also our work group was particularly focused on monolingual elicitation and despite the fact that it's a semi-structured interview I still consider these interviews to be a form of elicitation it's not a very natural setting you're still asking information of a participant that you want. And this was done through the medium of Nowat. We had two to four we had some rotating group members as well two to four Nowat speakers in our group. We had eight interviews scheduled but we actually ended up grabbing a ninth person by chance. So the interviews were pre-scheduled and they were all with Nowat speakers in the community and all the participants were between the ages of 50 and 80 so they were all of the older generation and our extra person was a 32 year old woman who happened to walk in at the end of the interview with her father and we got chatting and decided to pull her in for a young person's point of view. And everything apart from her interview was done in Nowat. I'm going to show a clip in a minute from an interview so you can see what it looks like. As the others have mentioned this is the focus on the monolingual sort of elicitation and research methods was a bit of an issue not only for us in the work groups who are non-Nowat speakers but also for the speakers themselves with the different varieties but as you'll see in the clip the lady interviewed can't remember what she was doing with Nowat so she switches to Spanish and then the interviewer actually persist with Nowat even though she was having a bit of a problem. So we'll see the clip it's a bit pixelated I think but it's not too bad it's got English subtitles and it's with Senora Marcellina she's 78 years old you'll see the interviewer in the middle is Martin he's a Nowat speaker and her cousin I think it is is also in the frame and you can sort of hear some chatting in the background that's the rest of the family coming in to see what's going on it's just a minute so we'll just have a wee look so we took all of our interviews together and we sort of divided them up into very broad groups and factors that we could identify bearing in mind we only had nine participants so we found that generally the older generation 70 plus tended to grow up speaking and hearing Nowat but people it was reported bearing in mind so the older people our participants were reporting on what they knew other people did so the people who were 40 to 70 tended to feel that they were particularly marginalised so discrimination is coming up again as a big topic as to why people aren't speaking Nowat and this particularly affected the generation under 40 as well where they were socialised in this environment which was quite ambiguous to the importance of using Nowat on a daily basis and people are still actively experiencing racism for using their own language one of the major findings was that no one actively transmitted Nowat to their children regardless of age or generation and people were only now beginning to consider this to be an important topic for the future level of formal education actually had a big impact on whether people spoke Nowat or not so education in Mexico is through the medium of Spanish and those people who attended formal education spoke less Nowat and in fact some the highest levels of education there was one instance of an English teacher absolutely refused to speak any and the people who were sort of in the middle generation even if they didn't necessarily speak Nowat generally felt proud to be Nowat as I mentioned a bit before we divided up the participants into different groups how they were socialised in Nowat so generally older participants learned Spanish at a later date informally so not through education but rather through friends or their husbands or wives and the people who grew up in a multilingual environment using both Nowat and Spanish on a daily basis tended to prefer to use Spanish they didn't necessarily consider Nowat to be important and also it's worth mentioning that a lot of these things that I'm talking about are quite common across lots of different situations and situations of language shift as well and we also discussed a bit about class and identity which is quite an important topic in Mexico and we found people who either self-identified as working class or who other group members assigned to the working class tended to speak more Nowat and people who also self-identified as Nowat spoke more. Interestingly though those speakers who were only using Nowat in certain domains or in public for certain themes we found to be the most susceptible to discrimination and as Julia pointed out this is actually against Fishman who proposes that Diaglossia is actually a point of departure for language revitalization those people who spoke Nowat less tended to demonstrate a positive attitude towards valorizing the language and even though they speak the language less and there is a lot of discrimination we felt that these people represented the best opportunity for revitalization efforts So there were lots of challenges during the field school and some of them were the fact that there was no real discussion about the overall goals and research topics that the participants were expected to engage with we were just told you need to document and everything needs to be done in Nowat regardless of whether you speak it yourself We as the participants can speak it. The assumption was that there would always be someone who spoke enough Nowat to translate to others but there was no real discussion what would happen when the variants of Nowat that were spoken weren't mutually intelligible There was no real discussion about the individual roles within the team there was very little time given to get to know each other we were told these are your groups you have half an hour to decide everything and then you have to go and conduct two to three interviews in two hours this did not take into account travel time getting lost time and all of these things so a lot of the working dynamics were established through trial and error which also works but if you want to collect good materials then you need more time you need to allocate more time to this there was no guidance on what kind of teams were expected to produce we were only told at a later date that the materials we collected would be used for creating pedagogical materials which meant that we kind of worked with what we had and created in some cases materials that were good in some cases materials that were not very good there was no information no guidance given on information and data management how to store the digital materials that we collected how to store data about the informants or consultants and ethical considerations how to in my group I was very clear and I asked them repeatedly to always ask for permission on every occasion and to continuously check in on the consultant and make sure that they were okay with being part of the recording I don't know how this was approached in the other groups because there was no overall communication of what the strategy should be there was no time given to prepare the sessions or very little time given to prepare the sessions and there we didn't really know very much about the speakers before we arrived in the field situation some of the assumptions on previous that were made on previous relationships that had been established between some of the organizers and the community but it wasn't these assumptions were then carried on into our field work and people thought that just because it had worked in the past it would work now whereas in reality time should have been taken to establish new working dynamics especially with a much larger working group of people that did not necessarily speak now what or Spanish did not necessarily know each other and kind of think about how do you approach this completely new situation and how will the consultants and community members themselves react to such a large influence of people there was very little accommodation to the change of dynamics so we were told you have to do it this way regardless of how the dynamic has changed the large groups meant that a lot of material was collected in my group for example we had three video cameras and three audio recorders and there was no consideration of what you do do with all of this material why are we actually collecting all of this material because in the end you get three versions of the same bad elicitation sessions and what do you do with it and it just takes up a lot of data on your on your storage and there were so far the groups that were focused on documentation we were given assigned topics we were told you will go and collect data from the traditional weaver and you will then go and collect data from the non-traditional weaver but there was no guidance of what does this have to do with language so we didn't actually end up collecting anything that was relevant to language documentation only on cultural documentation which is different relating to this for example my group was supposed to develop pedagogical materials the last day so we were told with the material you collected we have to prepare or design some pedagogical materials but we had no time so we had a little time to prepare something but in our case we just subtitled the song so everybody also talked about this so in every group we had at least two native now speakers but from communities from all over Mexico because now it's a really spread language in Mexico so in my case for example we were supposed to interview for example three families in two hours so our group was also split out into groups so in my group we had only one native now speaker and she was from another Mexican state so there were some misunderstandings so it made the situation a little bit complicated so we had to to change to Spanish in some cases so that was a really important issue for us for example our colleague from El Salvador who speaks now couldn't understand the Tlaxcala now another big problem also we had another problem so today is before the field school an entire community with Ju so that's why my group ended up working with Justina's one with the well-being group so we had to redesign the whole program and also in my case so we were told that the communities and the people we were supposed to work with they really they were really engaged with an hour of realisation they were eager to talk now with us but when we arrived at our first interview the family didn't want to participate to collaborate with us so the thing is that the person who spoke now wanted to talk with us but his family didn't want but we had the problem that the family didn't speak now so we were talking Spanish all the time and our native speaker was really scared of speaking now because she spoke another dialect so for example if he would have spoken now to demand directly we would reach some kind of agreement between us but we didn't so we ended up discussing for half an hour if we are doing this or not but we also learned a lot of things so we learned how the community works so the family explained us that they had a long experience with a language to come there and just extract or steal information from them and they don't receive anything so that was an issue that we didn't know so also the people who were taking us from family to family and who organised like solicitation sessions and documentary sessions was a well known family and maybe related to some kind of politics within the community so as Sam had said the native speakers were more related to the working class so the family that didn't work to collaborate with us at the end for example said you are getting something of profit, you Europeans and also the leaders of our community are getting something because of course they were like wealthier than them so we got this kind of problems and also the last problem I wanted to talk about is the insulin racism so we can say that colonisation is still alive in Mexico and maybe in all of South America and North America too and for example we went to a community the community gave flowers only to European guys the community sang songs with us, they wanted to take pictures only with us so half of our working group were Mexicans and they just felt ignored they were deceived, some of them cried and were really really upset about this and we had to address it with a like improvised workshop that we did in the next day because this was a big problem but paradoxically the impact that European people had in the community was really big and it kind of helped them to valorise the language so I guess it's just repeating a little bit what we've already said so a suggestion for future research is to allow for greater flexibility when you're eliciting data and use Spanish or fluid language to allow for multilingualism when you're collecting research it's an important topic to think through the implications of the language that you are using to actually elicit your data and to also consider that when you're doing your analysis it may have an impact on the answers that you collect and this also allowed for a wider range of interviewees not just a group of 50 to 80 year olds and a token a 30 year old because the certainly our group felt that the attitudes of semi-speakers and adult learners are actually key to understanding the best way forward to revitalising and revalorising now in this community I think we're back to the project leaders I'm sorry thank you very much so on a slightly more positive note the project as a whole has had quite a lot of impact outside academia and also within academia so as I mentioned earlier in the Villanvita area the local authority, the council of the town has actually accepted the project to start a living museum based actually on the collection of implements particularly agricultural implements protected by TMEK the kind of multi-purpose younger speaker of MSI and this is partly some of the plans that have been developed for this museum and it's also got to include a language archive some of the hundreds of hours that Peter mentioned that TMEK has collected as I mentioned at the end of the video clip as part during the Villanvita field school there was actually a meeting in the village of a parliamentary committee because I think 12 minority languages were actually recognised in Poland and if you know that as part of the European Union's language policies they have a charter on regional minority languages but nation states get to choose which languages they recognise and so Villanvita has been campaigning for its language to be recognised as an official minority language of Poland and so the parliamentary subcommittee held a special session in the village and we as participants as external experts and also local activists and speakers were invited to give presentations to the committee after that there was another special parliamentary session that was held before and as a result they have actually started to change the law so Wimi Sorya is currently set to become an officially recognised minority language of Poland and there has been considerable press coverage of this within Poland so this is a positive impact of the work that we've been doing with the language community in Villanvita on the scientific level which has been published going forward a memorandum of understanding with the University of Warsaw a couple of other universities mostly in the Netherlands and Germany to take forward this collaboration after this particular project ends and also one of the aims as we mentioned earlier was to apply for more grant funding and this has been done by Warsaw University so they have actually applied for two more grants both successfully getting the first one particularly focuses on language revitalisation and wellbeing which as I mentioned is a major theme in language revitalisation and set to become increasingly more important in the field we are not actually involved in this one ourselves though so in conclusion we have made considerable progress as part of the project but we also identify some issues which we're hoping to address in the near future we're going to talk about this at the forthcoming conference in Warsaw next month and also we're going to be holding a workshop here in London in January and we wanted to have a stock taking of what we've learnt so far on what we can do in the future so as you've probably gathered from the presentation on the Mexico Field School in operational planning both the field schools are far too demanding for trying to fit far too much in and that's an issue with regard to the general planning of the project altogether we don't see a lot of evidence so far of actually of participatory action research and community based participatory research particularly in with regard to the planning of the actual documentation and so we would like to address this in particular as Ebony mentioned for the Mexico Field School it was a collapsed time frame normally you would have months to sort this kind of thing out but it was all a bit top down in how the topics and the groups were allocated we're also kind of wondering what the official original beneficiaries are actually getting out of this the students at Warsaw the members of self at Warsaw University some of them we're also present at the Mexico Field School not necessarily understanding anything that was going on so we want to actually like to address whether this capacity building or knowledge transfer that was supposed to be what this project is all about is actually happening with regard to the official beneficiaries as I mentioned countering racism is a big aspect and our colleagues all of the participants are very engaged in countering racism and discrimination as one of the reasons for language and also for in itself but we can see a slight mismatch between that and essentialist attitudes that we've found so for example a lot of the documentation has been about traditional activities, traditional crafts etc. traditional agricultural practices talking to older people your kind of traditional speakers what about the younger speakers what is happening in language shift and how do we address language transmission in the future and this needs to be addressed I think here at SOAS we have a niggle about the funding of our activities as I mentioned the money that comes to SOAS is used to pay our wages but from that money for example when we're in Poland I'm going to have to rush back to teach you a lot on Friday because our beloved head of department is refusing to use any of that money to pay for teaching cover for me on the other hand as I mentioned there is strong potential for impact outside this capital I the impact gender is very strong in research funding in this country as well as in other countries nowadays we've been very successful in making links between both communities and academics and also in different parts of the world and also between other projects that we're running so for example we have another collaborative project with colleagues in Thailand and one of them will be coming with us to Poland for the workshop and a conference in November as I mentioned there's also been success in following projects and related funding and particularly with regard to the project on language and well-being which I think is set to become something quite big in the field finally how can you be involved as I mentioned we're going to have a workshop in January which are very welcome to take part in and we welcome contributions to that there will be field schools in the Isle of Man and Kaldakeno in Norway in the summer of 2018 and we will be looking for participants in those as well and we'll also be looking for participants in training workshops in Warsaw so yeah thank you very much for this name can we have a time? No, we still have a good 20 minutes for discussion and questions come up to the rest of you to take any questions comments that's it write this down it seems as Evanie was talking about the outcomes of some of the morphers in the field training and what is the picking apart all of these separate goals and outcomes what can you see the main goals and aims of the project and how's that how's the monitoring evaluation that's finished going to be brought to you I think this is why we need to have a stop take as I said the issues that I mentioned on the previous slide I think are all things that we need to address we had a meeting in Brussels as I mentioned which was very positive and actually this PowerPoint presentation apart from the Mexico field school which was since then so this was all mentioned as part of that they were particularly keen as I said on the level of collaboration between us and the University of Warsaw I think we do need to address to what extent they are actually taking to heart the methodological issues in particular that we have identified I think these issues haven't really been raised so far and it's partly because we're not taking time to do that so me and Peter and I I think me and Peter is correct also in local English are trying to raise these issues do you think that's what you'd like to say about that? I think this is a kind of a stop take the project's about just over one half way through so far so what we wanted to expose to you were both what we've been doing but also some of the issues we're grappling with and it seems to me that the the greatest goal, the overall arching goal is about skilling for our Eastern European colleagues and us learning through that process I would say reflexivity has been a major issue what we're trying to do is to reflect on practices, achievements, policies operations and say well how can we do that in a different way what would be the outcomes of that and that's something really new for them I think the idea that you actually reflect on practices so reflexivity and workflow planning and organization so rather than saying ah we're going to do ABC let's go right now on the bus we've only got three old ladies let's interview them quick we're actually spending a day figuring out what the hell you're going to be doing schedule it and so on what are the goals, how do we work back from the goals to what we're actually going to carry out it's project planning and I think it's been we haven't been quite so successful in getting across some of those ideas and notions so far as well so it's the bigger kinds of issues but it has, I mean the project has actually brought out a number of really useful things for us because issues like for example Julia mentioned the success with the team project so this is a project that the goals have put together and they've got partners some other partners that doesn't include SOAS for that particular project but it's looking at the links between what we've been doing and psychological physical emotional well-being for communities so if you take if I can just mention one thing quickly, Villa Mavicce immediately after the war when the new communist government took over people from Villa Mavicce were removed to exactly the same concentration camps that the Nazis had been using during the war to Auschwitz in fact they were shipped to Auschwitz after the war by the new communist government can you imagine the impact of this even today on living people who were subjected to that and so they're looking at things like health the health impact what happens when you change this and when you confront the trauma of the past and look at linguistic and cultural dimensions of that and we know from some research that's been done in Canada in particular that if indigenous communities have language and culture programs the levels of youth suicide health impact and so on are massively different so the team project is an outgrowth and an extension of what we've been doing so I think what I would sort of emphasize is the multi-disciplinarity trans-disciplinarity the reflexivity and the reflections on how do we actually do research how do we carry out research processes as well and we mentioned capacity development as one of the key can you speak up, we can't can you mention capacity development as one of the key features of the project and I wasn't sure how much of that was going on in the Mexican case it seemed like in Poland it was very strong and the outcomes for them were much stronger remember this is an EU funded project and it's essentially focused on Europe and we actually got special commission to include the Mexican component because it's outside of the normal realm that the EU deals with yeah it just seems a bit unbalanced in that aspect because it has to be by nature of the fact that it's a European focus project yeah that's what seemed a bit unbalanced because if in the European community they've already got all the benefits and privileges of being a EU citizen and you know they get to have the law change and to be recognised as an acoustic community but then the Mexican speakers didn't have the same outcome and I didn't feel that there was well yes as was mentioned they noticed they realised that there is still massive discrimination within Mexico and even within the communities and this is something but as a paradoxically having these international workshops can actually raise the profile of local languages and this is I think something that definitely had me in a bit say when the groups were going around the surrounding villages there were people there from China or student Sophie there was a student Buryat speaker from Russia from the Soviet Union there were students from people from various parts of the world and it made a quite impression on the local people that people had come from all over the world and particularly interested in the minority language that nobody had paid any attention to before So what was the capacity to learn an aspect in the Mexican community? They were taking part in the training workshops so they learn about things like how to do language documentation they learn about how to do language attitude research they were actually people from the community were actually organising most of the activities the people from Poland have been working with them for at least five years previously I think back to when Usina was doing her own PhD as well they've been working with them for quite a long time they're involved in language revitalisation projects with them already also as somebody mentioned earlier a lot of the these students particularly based in Leiden but also some of the ones in Poland are also originally from Mexico themselves so these are people who are coming over getting training and going back but principally the official purpose of this grant is to teach what we might call more modern methods of research to people who used to Eastern Europe who haven't had for a long time access to the general literature that we have just said similar to that were you I'm sorry you mentioned this kind of interdisciplinary element that was kind of going through your project we actually prefer trans-discipline trans-discipline I was interested in you and you mentioned for example the presence of archaeologists when you were on the Mexican bit I was wondering you kind of talked about some of the challenges I guess in the opportunities I was wondering if you could give maybe a specific example I'm quite interested in how this works in the context of Leiden was trying to work with somebody else with different death so in the context of the archaeologists he was analysing old manuscripts and looking at some of the practices that were used in terms of agriculture, in terms of rituals and making these manuscripts accessible to the existing language community and showing them these manuscripts and saying what do you take out of this and what would you like to reincorporate into your existing practices now was that useful for you as a linguist to that kind of information do you win on both sides there well I don't work with the manuscript would it be useful to me as a linguist can I answer because one of the PhD students in Warsaw and they're working with this guy in Leiden as well they are looking at old manuscripts one of them is particularly documenting the old glyphs that were used to write in Mexican languages and using that as an impetus for language revitalisation as well because it's not just about language it's about raising awareness of the history you've seen her started off her work as a historical linguist and then moved into language revitalisation so it's all about raising pride and self-confidence in the communities as well and part of that pride is in their history just a technical question in relation to the example where you made an arrangement when you got to the appointment the participant didn't want to do what you had agreed in that kind of scenario what kind of interpretation would you make of it and do you include that in your final kind of material is it something that you evaluate in that way it's part of our informed consent procedure that people have the right to withdraw people have the right to have part of their recording deleted if they want to and that's up to them it's their material it's their voice we just have to get on with it I'm afraid does it transform or change in any way what you then do subsequent to that yes I will you had to there was kind of on the hoof rethinking of the programme so one group had to join another group so anything else you'd like to say about that no was the question again please I think we accept that these kinds of things are normal part of the regular process and you have to have a plan B you have to have a backup plan and in the case as Alberto was saying was that on the last day because one group had lost their the community that they plan to work with they ended up reforming and working together with the well-being group on a particular topic so there was a backup solution to it I guess a message we could draw for all the students here is to always have a plan B because you can turn up thinking that you've you know this is my what I'm going to be doing for the next four hours and then suddenly discover that that doesn't actually work that way or somebody says go away alone or whatever people dropping out for all sorts of reasons particularly when we were without people they're often ill they've got better things to do with their lives than to crazy language documentaries and linguists have a backup plan as part of your planning is to actually have a backup plan and it worked in this particular case I have a question surrounding I think the term used really was sort of this idea that I feel it conveys a lot of language documentation where I mean rightly we're really focused on endangered practices in addition to the language but especially maybe in the European context where people aren't living traditional lifestyles necessarily what do you sort of see as the right balance to strike in terms of what are the things we should be documenting what are the modern takes on language documentation that we should be teaching in these context I have a particular ideological view on this didn't we also do the same thing on that first of all before I launched you to my title I found it was interesting that you said that in Europe it's less traditional because in the Americas for example you will have also indigenous people who live less traditional lifestyles who still consider themselves globalization is a big factor in the language shift but it is true we have this idea that the indigenous person embodies certain things that we assign to them and these are also preconceptions that exist within each of these exotic countries that the indigenous people have to challenge themselves and they have to say no actually we are modern indigenous people we have computers we speak two languages we have better communication you need to accept us for what we believe we can give a lecture in our language at Leiden University for example or alternatively we can speak in Spanish if we want to we don't have to speak in and the problem in this case was that at least one of the Polish colleagues wanted everything to be monolingual because he believed this was fantastic for revitalization we are purely monolingual and Julia and I have been trying to challenge that both from a practical and from a more theoretical perspective it's not just for our benefit because the language shift is happening the younger generations don't speak Nalwa so if you want to speak Nalwa in the interviews you are only going to get a certain sector of the population taking part so you don't actually get the views and the attitudes and the experiences of people who have been on the receiving end of language shift and one of the things that I want to look at more with regard to language rights is there a right to reclaim a language that wasn't passed on to you or we have been talking to other people who didn't pass the language on nobody has actually got experience of teaching anybody this language personally my own view is that we need to document not only we do need to document how things use to be but we also need to document how things could be in the future talk to people about doing all sorts of things in their language of things that they might want to do in the future in their language and about how one might invent or repurpose terminology for fridges and mobile phones, computers etc things that are part of everyday life now that you can't talk about in that language is there a particular department within the University of Warsaw which you are it's the Artists Liberales we don't not working with the linguistics department as you may have guessed there's internal politics within the University of Warsaw which has been a bit of an issue as well that's, we're not worried about that we're not part of the university we have time for one more question the chair has been very good do you have a question? I'm curious how the EU is measuring your progress with your API you want to see one of the spreadsheets we have multi-coloured spreadsheets we have work packages we have it's astounding anybody, if you ever want to get involved in an EU project don't do it or alternatively have a colleague in Europe colleagues in Europe who have somebody employed full-time just to do that they do in Poland at the University of Warsaw they have one person employed full-time just to deal with the compliance he's actually a lawyer he's not an academic researcher and he does all of the reporting and dealing with deadlines and so on Julia was going to... we ran out of time preparing this we were going to show you one of our multi-coloured spreadsheets can you imagine every single month for three years we've got different colours and stuff like that and there's a whole language to learn in terms of EU terminology as well this is part of the process part of doing research to manage that and to deal with it and it's been actually I think very instructive for me and probably for Julia as well to work with our colleagues in Poland and Leiden who know how to do these things with Brexit who knows if we'll ever get a chance to do it again but the whole management well, operational planning and management that has been very instructive and helpful and so I could learn a huge amount from the professional way in which research is managed in Leiden and in Warsaw so it has been very detailed and they check all of our as you say, key performance indicators and so on and finance as well but luckily we have a finance department in the research office who does that part of the reporting course so I'm afraid I have to interrupt you but maybe not for long we need to move from here to the second home of the department of seminar with the IOE if you want to join the participants it's actually UCL it's not IOE anymore it's UCL IOE that place just across the wall there thank you very much to this here thank you