 Hi, everyone, and good afternoon. Welcome to the Revitalizing Indigenous Languages web chat. My name is Martin Perchler, and I work in the State Department's Cultural Heritage Center, where I run the US Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation. I'd like to welcome our guest speakers today from the Smithsonian. Dr. Mary Lin is a curator of cultural and linguistic revitalization at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Dr. Lin focuses on ways we can help sustain indigenous languages and cultures. Also with us today is Dr. Gwen Isaac, curator of North American Ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Dr. Isaac is a lead researcher with the Smithsonian's Recovering Voices Initiative, which works with communities worldwide to sustain and celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity. Thank you both for being here today. I'd also like to give a shout out to our friends around the world who have tuned in to watch, and we hope participate in, this conversation. Many thanks to all who have gathered at seven different viewing parties in Canada and Bolivia. Mary and Gwen, we'd love to hear about the efforts underway to revitalize indigenous languages in North America. After your presentations, we will take questions from our live audience. To our friends watching this online, feel free to ask questions and write comments in the chat space or tweet us at exchange alumni. Let's get started. Mary? So if you're here today, you probably know that there is a serious problem with language diversity around the world. But I want to spend a few minutes just getting a little bit background on that. So there's a rapid decline in diversity throughout the world. Globally, linguistic diversity has declined over 20% from 1970 to 2005. The diversity of the world's indigenous languages have declined even more rapidly at 21%. If you look regionally, indigenous linguistic diversity declined over 60% in the Americas, 30% in the Pacific, including Australia, and almost 20% in Africa. So if you can see an index of language diversity slide in front of you, the green light represents the Americas. And you can see the really dramatic decline from 1970 to 2005. If we compare language endangerment to other forms of endangerment around the biosphere, fish come in at 5% of endangerment. We plant 8% of all plant life is endangered. For birds, 11% of all bird life are endangered. Mammals that we hear about the most, especially pandas and big cats, 18% are endangered. But for languages, it comes out way stronger with 40% plus percentage of all world's languages are endangered today. When is a language endangered? Well, we say a language is endangered when its speakers cease to use it, or they use it in fewer and fewer domains or contexts. They use it in fewer registers or speaking styles. So maybe some of the more fancy, flourish of languages or really good storytelling styles will slowly start to diminish. The most important point is when we stop passing it on to our children into the next generation. It's at that point that we can truly say a language is endangered. There's different levels of endangerment as well. Every minority language around the world is actually threatened. But UNESCO has this kind of levels of endangerment where vulnerable languages are where most of the children speak the language, but it is still restricted to certain domains, especially maybe just at home or maybe just in school. A language is definitely endangered when children are no longer learning the language as a mother tongue in the home. And severely endangered when the language is spoken by grandparents or only the older generations. And then critically endangered when the youngest are actually the grandparents or oldest. So really the only the very elderly speak the language. UNESCO uses the word extinct when there are no fluent first language speakers left to the language. In North America, we tend to not use that term. We call a language silent at this point. Silent refers to the fact that there's no fluent first language speakers, but there is documentation that exists. And there is a community that identifies with the language and wants to renew it. If we look globally again around the world out of about 6,500 languages, over 3,000 of them are endangered. So you can see again that it's pretty critical. The slide that you're looking at now is the UNESCO language vitality assessment. The point here is that no one single factor determines whether a language is endangered. But UNESCO has identified nine factors that should be considered together. And these are pretty much agreed upon everywhere. There's more than this, but usually when we think of language and vitality, we think of the number of speakers, but it's way more complicated than that. Really intergenerational transmission, again, passing it on to your children. The community members' attitudes towards their language is really important. The shifts in domains, again, if you have fewer and fewer contexts or spaces that you can use it in, if there's governmental support, institutional support, if there's documentation, and how people respond to new domains and new media, especially things like cell phones. Availability of language and structural material, and then you get to the number of speakers and the proportion of speakers to the population. Next slide. So one last slide just to show you that the number of endangered languages by country, this includes outside of North and South America, and you can see Africa, Asia as well. But you can see North America is pretty endangered. Next slide. So that's the more sad news, but there's a lot of things that are really working, and people have been working on language revitalization for many years now. Next slide. So the vitality of the language really affects what kind of approach a community can take towards language revitalization. And we have some specific terms that you may hear out there. So when a language still has some children acquiring it or using it in the home, we generally refer to language maintenance. And this is ways to support the language. I have them go back a slide, sorry. Okay, you need to go back a slide? I keep going. Okay. So language maintenance approaches really support a language that is vulnerable, especially putting it in the schools, getting policy, the kind of thing. Language revitalization is a term that's usually used to refer to when a language is endangered. And there's a lot of new strategies and approaches that especially native North America has developed to try to reverse language shift. And we'll talk a little bit more about those in a minute. When a language is silent, that's when we talk about language renewal or language revival. And that generally has to rely on documentation. And at that point, we need to look at museums and archives and collections. Next slide. So what have we learned overall, all of the approaches to maintenance revitalization and renewal? We've learned that language really should come early in life. We've learned that schools and preschools are key, but often not the first step in language revitalization. It just takes too many resources for many communities. We've learned that each group has gone through different phases in the process and they need to reevaluate and replan as they go. We've also learned that immersion is important. And although adherence of it varies, we know that the more you hear a language, the better you are. Next slide. So let's talk about some of the revitalization approaches especially that have been developed in North America. One of these is called the language nest. It actually started in Maori, New Zealand for the Maori speakers and later moved to Hawaii, but it's been widely adopted throughout North America. And this is where you focus on a preschool, really small, oftentimes a language nest is actually in a family with several families coming together and you use the language with the littlest children. Oftentimes the community will then scaffold the language and create materials for kindergarten. While the kids are in kindergarten, they start preparing lessons and materials for first grade and scaffolding and all that until they get to in the Hawaii case all the way through 12th grade. Another approach is the master apprentice. This is for severely endangered languages where there may be only two or three elderly speakers and you pair a elder speaker with a younger person who is dedicated to passing on the language immediately. So they immediately turn around and start teaching the language. Another one that's developing right now is a family focused. You see these in very small communities with few speakers as well, such as Yuchi in Oklahoma. And these, you're really focused on just the family of trying to put the language slowly back into more, let's say the kitchen at first, the dining room, bedtime activities and so on. What have we learned from language revitalization? We've learned that networking and influence of programs on each other inspiration is really important. We've also learned to honor tradition and elders but allow the language to live in the 21st century. This is something that all tribes and communities that I've worked with has learned. We've also learned that music seems to be very, very important in language revitalization. It gives the young people and the older people something to really concentrate on and inspire them and motivate them. We've also learned that family revitalization coincides with or follows school programs so that if it's in the schools, it really has to be in the family as well and support needs to be given to families. Next slide. So let's talk about renewal approaches. This is when there aren't any first language fluent speakers. The approach here is generally called the breath of life. This was innovated actually in a combination of family approach but has moved to communities as well by the Miamia, the Miami tribe and the Wampanoag. So if you don't have any speakers, then you need to find the documentation. You need to train in linguistic to read the documentation because most documentation is done in linguistic ease. You need to start using it in your language and then your language and your family and then move out to community. And often using material culture collections to rebuild lots of knowledge and life ways that have been misplaced along with the language as well. These are called breath of life workshops. They started in California. They've been done in Oklahoma and also in Washington DC and Gwen will talk more about that. There's also communities that have adopted this approach as well. What we've learned from this, well that documentation is not revitalization by itself but it is invaluable to communities with no fluent first language speakers and that it is possible to bring back a silent language. Before these examples, it had never been known to be able to happen. Next slide. So what is success in revitalization? Well, we like to think that revitalization of community use of the language in daily communication but we really don't have very many examples of that. Maybe Hebrew in some Welsh communities and in some Basque communities as well in Europe. We also think of success as producing new generations of speakers like in Hawaii. Even if the kids may not be using it in every context, they are considered speakers of the language. We can call it success when we produce one or two new speakers within a home like the Miyamia, the Wampanoag or the Yuchi. Next slide. We can also say it's success if one young person learns to speak his or her language. To me that is an amazing success in many contexts. We can call it success if a community starts using emblematic use of the language such as greeting, signs and t-shirts for many communities that's the first start. And we can call it success if there's reaffirmation of identity. Next slide. We also consider it success if to reintroduce the language into old and new domains, to get training and revitalization to document and to revitalize cultural expressions and traditions such as weaving, music, dance, poetry, food ways. And we can say now that language revitalization is a global movement. It's become worldwide with indigenous and autocranist communities and associated with identity and rights and sovereignty, the right to speak the language of your choice, the right to inability to control your education. Access to the language is associated with improvements in children and young adults in graduation, in high school entrance, lower suicide rates, lower substance abuse and involvement in society. We need more hard data on this but anecdotally we know that this is happening. And improvements in local economy as well through education, through continued local artistry which is marketable locally and globally. Okay, so we're turning over. Okay, so next slide, this is for Gwen now. Hi, my name is Gwenyar Isaac. I'm curated for North American Ethnology at the National Museum of, sorry, the National Museum of Natural History. I'm a social anthropologist who specializes in studying the intersections of culturally distinct knowledge systems. And this means I take a special interest in collaborative projects between Native American communities and museums. And I chose to come to DC in 2010 to work with the newly started recovering voices initiative at the Smithsonian because I saw there was a great need to connect communities with museum collections. The collections represent immeasurable repositories of cultural knowledge and these are often not available to the majority of community members. Next slide please. So what is recovering voices? It's an initiative made up of research and collaborative programming that uses collections and expertise to support community efforts at revitalizing their language and traditional knowledge. In specific, it brings together three units at the Smithsonian and these include the National Museum of Natural History where I'm based in the Department of Anthropology. It includes the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage where Mary Lynn is based and also the National Museum of the American Indian. And we also have external partners. And all three of these have extremely important collections and archives and expertise that once brought together create important sort of synergetic power to transform how we think about revitalizing endangered languages. Next slide please. So if we look at this, the topic of what we do within recovering voices are just three of the programs that we run. We have the Community Research Program where we fund groups to come to the Smithsonian and work on the collections. We also have the Breath of Life Program that takes place every other year at the National Anthropological Archives and this pairs community members and scholars with linguists and archivists to work on primary documents that help as part of the revitalization process. And we also have the Mother Tongue Film Festival that's a public program that helps educate the general public about language endangerment and revitalization. Next slide please. So then if we look at how we do this, I just wanna talk a bit about the methodology. So our methodology links people with collections but this can also be seen as linking expertise with effective modes of access and use. So the three specific things I can talk about here are training such as with the Breath of Life Program where we work to connect communities with archives, collections and digital databases but also provide training within those processes. We also privilege groups that incorporate elders and youth in their project design as a means for effective intergenerational transmission of knowledge. And we also are working on building long-term relationships and this approach is designed to include follow-up surveys with communities after projects that they've conducted with us as well as longitudinal studies so that we can learn lessons about how to build stronger partnerships between communities and museums. Next slide please. So I wanted to talk a bit about who we work with. In this specific case, I have four communities I'll just touch on very briefly. In the first, the Pueblo of Hopi, we work with Hopi Potters who are concerned about the loss of traditional values within the production of pottery and this is coming from pressure from the art market. So to give you an example, the traditional pottery has often, when it's in a kiln, it produces what the potters refer to as a blush and this sort of embodies this idea of friendship and warmth that you feel within a friendship and the women traditionally use the pottery to develop kin networks between themselves and clan members and so forth but the art market has put much more emphasis on the aesthetics of the pottery and has dissuaded the potters from producing this blush so they use electric kilns and so we're part of a sort of ongoing conversation. We'll be holding a festival, a pottery festival in the spring where elders and youth will work together around the Smithsonian collections and conversations about what are the traditional values. In the second project, we've been working with Anishinaabe from Manitoulin Island and the story I wanted to share was that Mina Toulouse who came with us from Manitoulin Island to work on the Quillwork basket, requested when she was traveling, she said, I'd like to bring my husband, I don't often travel very often and so she brought her husband who turned out to be the environmental expert who really sources all the raw materials for her and he became a key player within the project and during the time that he was working in the collections, he discovered some early tools that were used in the maple syrup collecting process and he got very excited, he said, he hadn't seen these since he was a child and he now produces videos with his colleague, Al Corbier, for the children about the tech, the traditional techniques for maple syrup collecting and this came out of in many ways a kind of happenstance discovery within the collections. We also work with the Wanapam from Washington State and they are in the process of bringing back the traditional fishing methods and there are specific tools that they are working to recreate such as the ring net fishing weight that goes on the net. We also recently started working with a group of Wauja from Brazil who are struggling with deforestation and so when they came, not only were they working in the ethnographic collections, they also spent time with the botanical and mammal collections, identifying them using the Wauja terminology but we also had a happenstance meeting between the Wauja and the community that was working with us from the Pueblo of Zuni and they had a fascinating discussion between the two of them about medicinal plants as it turned out and we hadn't known this at the time that all of them were medicine men both from Wauja and from Zuni. And then next slide please. This leads me on to the next topic which is health and heritage. It's become clear with all the communities that we work with that health is one of the number one issues that people are both interested in and focusing on and we're also finding that there is a direct correlation with revitalization programming and positive outcomes for health which I think is something that is important and we are starting to place more emphasis on this within the programming. Next slide please. So to conclude, I just want to talk about how we find that these collaborations between the communities and the museums are very empowering and then I can also say that I feel myself that I've been transformed through this and that I've learned of all the kind of potential things that can be done in these kind of collaborations and working with collections and that's also I think changed me, transformed me and opened my eyes to the possibilities. So thank you very much. Well thank you both Mary and Gwen for your presentations. You raised a lot of issues. You describe many successes and you describe many challenges and right now we'd like to go to our viewing groups in Canada. Let's start with Ottawa. Ottawa, do you have some questions for our presenters today? Okay. Hi my name is Burnham McGregor and I'm with the Native Women's Association of Canada. I just had a question because we've had some resources developed using technology. So have you found that technology has impacted also the retention of the languages and do you have some examples? Thank you. Technology has really opened space for youth, for younger learners of a language and for younger users, even first language speakers in some places. It gives them a space to be able to use the language especially those who are using it for the first time. It's a safe place. Oftentimes there's not elder first language speakers in that space where they may feel like they're going to be corrected in other context. In new media they aren't, especially on Facebook or WeChat, these kinds of things. They're very comfortable in those domains. It also hooks up youth and young adults in different areas. So if there's only a few people who could speak the language with them when they go to school and then they go home and if they have internet connection then they can talk to each other in that way. So in those ways and other ways, games can be very fun. A lot of tribes and villages and places are creating certain kinds of apps. They can also be very good tools for families especially for the parents to rely on to help them keep, feel like they can do some of the vocabulary that their children are learning at school. So there's a lot of ways that they're very, very helpful to communities. They can be a distraction like they are to youth anywhere. Your kid can be buried in it too much and not being focused on other things that their parents want them to be focused on including language. So there's a bad side to them. But I think overall I've been really pleased with how technology has really made a very good space for younger people to try to use the language. Well, thank you very much, Ottawa. Let's go next to Vancouver. Vancouver, do you have a question for our presenters today? Well, hi, good morning and thank you for their presentation. My name is Dr. Elden Yellowhorn on chair of the Department of First Nations Studies at Simon Fraser University. The language that I grew up speaking Blackfoot which is one of the endangered languages and about 40 years ago, 45 years ago we invested a lot in creating a written version of Blackfoot and here we are 40 years later, 50 years later and writing is still a linguistic novelty. There's no such thing as mass literacy. And so I'm just wondering, is there still a vital role for writing or committing spoken languages to a written format? I think it depends on the community. There is, I mean the basic form of language is spoken, right? We grow up, we speak in the language, we don't learn to write it. If we learn to write a language we don't learn to do it until later on. So it is the primary mode of communication and there are very successful language revitalization programs that never rely on literacy at all and others do. And part of, when you develop a writing system and start to develop even step by step some literature, some teaching materials, these kinds of materials that rely on the written form, it's a way of standardizing the language and standardization is very difficult, it's not impossible, but it's a very long-term goal and a lot of times communities feel like it should happen really fast because you need that tool. If you decide that you need writing as a tool you want that tool and you feel like if we have a writing system we have that tool, but if you think of even English it took hundreds and hundreds of years to standardize English and even today it's not necessarily standard everywhere, right? Even in the writing system. So it's a long-term process and just because it didn't take hold right away if your community still wants to have written forms of the language in some context that I say to keep going with it it always takes a lot of communication, a lot of, I want to say struggle but I hate to be negative, but it is kind of a struggle but it's part of a really long process. Did that help? Thank you for your response. I have a question. I'm really interested in the work that you're doing with health and well-being because of the health situation in our communities. I'd like to know more about what you've been, what you've learned and what you are doing with developing the indigenous knowledge of health and well-being through language. Okay, so we started in 2012 we were funded to do a workshop with the Smithsonian and we had people coming from communities from all over from Alaska, from across the US and the conversation was really just started to try and identify what was this relationship between culture and health and very quickly moved into what you're talking about which was recognizing the really important role that traditional knowledge plays in both defining and maintaining well-being within communities and that often the healthcare providers and the structure is not necessarily enabling or empowering the traditional knowledge. So the first workshop was really a kind of an identification process. We've been holding workshops pretty much every year. The next one was held at Western Carolina University and was hosted by the Cherokee, the Eastern Band of Cherokee and they have a number of programs where they're working on some of these issues and they have youth programs and the examples that certainly that I came away with AquaSasne Mohawk have a sort of a youth cohort rights of passage program that they've had such success with that it's kind of a growing program and again the idea is that there's a relationship that develops between elders and the youth and that there's sort of positive well-being, training that goes into the rights of passage. I'm also very interested in the work and Stacey Rasmussen who works in Alaska has been part of the group and she does heritage programming as part of suicide prevention and that's been very successful and then the most recent case I could give you is Darryl Baldwin who's just recently written about work that he's looking at statistics for language revitalization and positive outcomes with health. So the group, we have lots of really great examples and we know that there really is a strong correlation. We bring federal programs to the workshops so we have people from NIH in various divisions, the Indian Health Services and so forth and 80% of the participants in the group are young native scholars who are training both in their communities and in public health which is important. But what we are finding is certainly that NIH or the National Institutes of Health and the people who fund things want statistical evidence and so a lot of what these programs are gonna have to, I shouldn't say have to but a lot of what the work is in the future is to sort of find a middle ground where the community work is supported but that there is also some research that shows what the correlation is so that funding can be changed to much more preventative care as opposed to sort of crisis care which is often one of the problems. But I'm very happy to take to my email hopefully is available and please contact me and I'd love to talk more about this because it's a growing group of people. So, yeah. Thank you and thank you, Van Coover. Next we'd like to turn to our group in Montreal. Montreal, do you have a question for our presenters? We do. Yes, I do. I have a couple of questions. My name is Pascal Anwal, very French, very Creole from Haiti but I'll speak to you in English. So I first want to honor, actually we're on Gagnana Gaha in English known as Mohawk Land and I work for the Urban Aboriginal Health Center which is in the making. My question is perhaps to Dr. Isaac as a social anthropologist and I am very grateful for the presentation and for the availability of your emails. Basically I know you did some work also with the Audenac Museum, the Abinaki Museum in Audenac and I was wondering in this work do you have the opportunity to leave behind some of the tools being developed but also the archive and the richness of your discussions to the people with whom you work? That would be one question like for example with Nicolo Bomsawin and when you came to Canada. Yeah, no, that's a great question. So the Recovering Voices Program, one of the specific things that we've learned is necessary is that we videotape as long as everyone who's participating in the group is happy. We videotape all of the consultation, conversations and research. So often groups will come for a week or depending on the kind of project sometimes up to a month. So we videotape absolutely everything. We certainly make sure that all of the sort of accession information is also available about the collections that can also go home. This all gets put on external hard drives or CDs depending on the kind of technology the community would like and then that goes back with the group. We've found that often some of the groups, people are coming from different villages so that everyone has their own material when they go home. That's become a crucial point. But the idea is that they can then use that material for public programming, for educational programming, or just as a sort of a research tool if they wanna go back in and look at something. And so we're also training in what that means in terms of us also using the, archiving the digital and making sure that it's retrievable. So we produce logs and so forth so that if someone from the community came back to the museum and says I wanna look at something that a relative or a grandparent looked at 50 years ago, we would be able to retrieve that and the conversation continues. So it's also asking the museum to in a way to rethink how we create new knowledge and where does that go? But it's a good question, I'm glad you asked. Can I add to it? Another way that people take this home with them as well is in the Breath of Life program. So when they come to specifically work with language materials, but they also look at other heritage materials as well, they usually leave with the digitized copies of all the manuscripts in the language that they've been working in as well. So it's another thing that they get to take with them. Thank you, Montreal. We'd next like to go to our group at Quebec City. Quebec City, do you have a question for our presenters today? Not anymore. Hi, Montreal has one more. Are we okay with that? Sure thing. Thank you. It's a short one, thanks. So I was wondering also with the opening of the New Smithsonian African American History Museum and the long existing African arts history, are you privy to some cross-cultural work with those museums in-house on the same issues of language preservation? Actually, yes. For the Mother tongue Film Festival, we're really happy that this year we have a representative person that has worked in both places at the African American Museum and then also at the National Museum of American Indian. She's interning, I think, over there now. But so we have that crossover. We're definitely trying to include African languages in our film presentations as well. Okay, thank you very much, Montreal. Quebec City, have a question for our presenters. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Quick, we are with you. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to welcome the Council of the United States on the territory of the Huron One Dot Nation. The Neo wants you. And I want to commend you for what you've been doing, the beautiful presentation, and it's very entertaining. Now, I wanted to know a little bit more because of, you know, we really link the territory, the traditional territory to the language, you know. And we've seen that throughout the world, it seems that it's in the Americas, mainly in Canada and North America, where the language is mostly badly hurt in terms of seeing the percentage of our people losing this capacity to speak their own language. So I didn't hear almost anything about, you know, the territoriality and the language also, you know. Because for us, the more you lose your territory, your access to the territory, your capacity to be engaged within your territory, the more you lose your language because any person of the language, Aboriginal languages are linked directly to the land, to the territory. So could you explain a little bit why you forgave or why you did not address the issue of the territory? Because in Canada, you know, this is what hurts the most First Nations all over, through federal policies of comprehensive claims process where we have to fight between ourselves in order to claim and to claim and to claim lands that might belong to others also. Thank you. I think that it was a matter of time and we apologize for leaving out such a large section in that way. But you're absolutely right. It's one of the most critical issues is, and I can address a little bit about how people try to restore in language revitalization this link if it has been lost. So there's what's called place-based curriculum, and it's basically creating a curriculum for all ages, but in this case, it's usually applied to younger children through high school where the whole curriculum goes around the seasonal cycles and what people traditionally do in those cycles. So all of your math, your science, everything is done through traditional activities that involve the land and the seasons. And it's the most effective type of school curriculum that is out there. It works, of course, right? Because it gets people out doing what they want to be doing and what they were doing and it reconnects them to the land. Now I know in Canada and the places that you're talking about, it is really a struggle to not lose that. And I think that it's one of those things that when you link language and the environment and religion and life ways together, there's a really strong claim. And you can see that as one of the things that's happening in North Dakota in the United States right now is that in linking the land to religion as well is the only way that policy may be able to intervene in those cases. So I think it's a really strong connection. We know that when people get forcibly removed from their lands, they lose a lot of the language very rapidly. And it's one of the tragedies that language revitalization is trying to restore. But yeah. Okay, thank you, Quebec City. I'd like to take a moment now to take a question that we received online and this is a question from Cote d'Ivoire. And the question is, do you think it will be an easy task to give life to endangered indigenous languages since colonizers have often made some people unproud of their languages? It's the hardest part of it. Orthographies are really hard as you guys have found out. Starting schools are very hard. Everything is really hard but the hardest is really changing the attitudes of the people because of colonialization and actually language ideologies of the Western world even if it's not pushed upon. It's there every day that monolingualism is a normal state that you can only learn one language that your language isn't as good as this language. These types of issues are really hard to backtrack from. One of the things again, talking about technologies with languages even though there's a big gap on the internet with languages, again, the dominant languages are out there more, more and more people, youth especially, are really able to create their own apps, they're able to do things with the language and it adds to the prestige of the language. So the more that the language can be used in newer domains as well, the more that prestige goes up. So there's ways that it is really, it's one of the most difficult parts of the whole puzzle is the attitude. Well, thank you, Cote d'Ivoire for that question. We'd like to go back to our viewing groups in Canada. Ottawa, do you have another question for Mary and Gwen? Yes, we did, one moment please. About to come up. Yeah, if you can go. I'm Jeanette Kearney, I'm a parliamentary intern at the House of Commons and I did my master's research in Nunavik looking at mining, so not language related, but one thing that I heard about the Inukstuk language is that there is a possibility of Nunavik and Nunavut and some other Inukstuk speaking areas to standardize the language as kind of a way to protect it or strengthen it. And I was just wondering what your thoughts were on that. So these three different languages or dialects would create one standardized form, is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yes, there are examples out there where this can work, okay, and they're right. It does help streamline resources. If you have fewer teachers, if you have fewer resources, it's good to be able to put it all together, right? I would have them look at the Basque situation in Spain. There are seven different Basque communities and after the dictatorship ended in 1978 and they were given the right to have education in their own language, they quickly created a standard dialect. It was a dialect that nobody spoke as a home language, as a first language. And it became immediately implemented in all of the schools that had any of the immersion, Basque immersion. And it wasn't an easy sell. It was really hard. The kids were learning a form of Basque nobody really spoke. There was backlight, but they kept going on it. Good or bad, they kept going. And now there are generations of this eighth dialect. Now they call it the eighth dialect because those younger kids grew up and some of them married and they had kids and they used that dialect in the home. And the kids who learned that standardized form could once they learned that form they could speak the other dialects because they spoke at least one dialect of Basque. So they did it. They aren't really finding that they're losing the dialects. They just added one to it. It wasn't easy, but I think that if they want to find out more looking at the Basque information which is often published in English as well as in Spanish and Basque and a little bit in French then I think that's a good model for them to look at. It's possible. Not every community would agree to do it though. Thank you. I'd like to turn again to Vancouver and ask if there is one more question from the Vancouver group. Yeah, I have a question to Dr. Yellowhorn again. I am part of, for lack of a better term, a Blackfoot diaspora where people are leaving the homeland and taking the language with them. And when they settle in cities it's very difficult to maintain that language, at least the fluency. So what I wanted to find out or thought your thoughts on is recruiting members of the general public to help in this by adopting a language, almost having a boutique language where they can help to continue the survival and whether this is a good idea. I think if your community feels like they want a lot of outsiders learning the language like that then that's fine. I would say most languages are okay with anybody learning it as long as they're respectful, right? But there are some groups that don't want a lot of other people learning the language. So if your community, especially your community members that are in a metropolitan area, feel like that's a good avenue and a good way to keep up their practice and expand people to speak with. I think that's really great. Because the more you use the language, the more you're gonna keep it or learn it, right? So that gives you another avenue. Another thing people have done in that situation is really setting up, and this is where the writing comes in if you're writing it, to start really kind of pen pal, things back home, the kind of old fashioned pen pal or the texting or coming together in a space where people can get together at least once a week but forming some other kinds of new spaces, whether it's a boutique language or not, forming these new spaces as well and reconnecting at home and often the written language, but now you can do Skype, right? Well, thank you, Vancouver. We have a question from one of our Bolivian viewers. So someone from Bolivia. The question is one of our main problems is motivating youth to use endangered languages. Since many of them consider these languages useless and are even ashamed of using them. And our Bolivian viewer is asking for some advice on how to motivate the next generation. Wow, there's probably a lot of people in the audience in Canada that have really great answers to that as well. I wish we could all communicate that way. Well, definitely things that kids are interested in. What are kids interested in? Well, each other, love, right? Oftentimes, creating a place where what youth want to do, you don't want the language of authority either that this is what they're supposed to learn, right? Even if you can get over the hurdle of being ashamed. So creating safe spaces where they're not ashamed to use it, where it's very protected and doing something that the kids want to do. I don't know for your particular community what that might be. I would look at music, music genres, even new music genres. If the kids like rap and there's no really religious reason for them not to do rap, play with rap with them. Do things that they want to do in the language. And I was kind of joking about love, but kids, they talk about things that they want to talk about and that's often what they're doing and they're interested in boys or interested in girls. Wouldn't be always my first place to start, but again, you want to get them over that hurdle that my language can't be used for what I want it to be what I want to talk about. So it needs to be modernized for them in some way and then that they feel safe and comfortable to use it. Oftentimes a mentor program is also really good to mentor them with older people because kids may not respond as well with the direct authority of a parent or aunt or uncle, but maybe their grandparents or great grandparents or something like that. So having some kind of connection that safe space that way as well. These are all things that I can think of that people have tried and seem to work across different cultures. And I just want to add to that from my experience in Wales is that there needs to be an economic advantage to speaking the language. So if there's jobs, if there's radio stations, television and so forth, then they feel it's the future and this builds on what Mary's saying. But certainly economic advantages to speaking the language. What are the things we did in Oklahoma as we started a youth language fair? Because and kids who were learning their languages and there's about 40 different tribes in Oklahoma so and about 40 different languages. So they could come together, see the other kids were learning the language and do some kind of presentation in the language. It was terrifying at first. The first year kids were really scared but they began looking forward to it every year and they won prizes for doing it. It wasn't highly, highly competitive, although some groups were more competitive than others but it showed them that they could do something and receive positive feedback for it. Oftentimes that led to them getting interested in an older art form and they became more and more involved in it and connected the language to it and some of them are doing really well not necessarily in language per se but in traditional arts forms that they are able to make a living or at least a partial living on it as well. So that's another thing you're right. The economics is important. Well thanks for that question. We'd like to go back to Montreal and find out if you all in Montreal have another question for the presenters here. Of course. Thanks again and I think I'll try to stay in line with the second round of question. I was wondering if, so if you were to pick or propose to have one indigenous language on the USA land brought to constitution a little bit as a post-apartheid adoption of the constitution being rewritten in 11 languages, do you think it would be a venue to support and to affirm an indigenous language? It would but I would not be the one to choose one. 11 is a good number. Ultimately I think that it would be nice to be given the opportunity for every tribe to translate it, the American constitution into the language of their choice or not to do it if that is their choice as well. So I think that would be even more representative and emblematic of the diversity that is in North America and has always been in North America. Thank you for that question Montreal. Go back city, we'd like to hear from you if you have a question. Yes, we have two questions for now. Thank you. Yes, can you hear me from there? Dr. Graham McConnell from, while I worked for many years in the International Center for Research on Language Planning in LaValle University. And in the 1970s we started two international projects with Dr. Klose of Germany. One project was a statistical project on the linguistic composition of the nations of the world and we produced about seven volumes including pretty well all of the languages of all of the countries of the world. I think the only major area that we didn't do was Africa because it was so complicated and we ran out of time. But the other project was called the languages of the world and it was a sociolinguistic project based on a detailed sociolinguistic description of the use of each language. I think about 10 domains were covered with many functions. I noticed you used the words in your expose of vitalization and revitalization. But we did a major project in India with the Registrar General's Office which is the census division in the Indian government and they have a language census in India. And so we covered about 100 languages, some of the major languages, major state languages, constitutional languages and down to the tribal languages, giving a very detailed sociolinguistic description of their use. And we eventually worked out a quantification of the vitality of each of these languages. I noticed you used the word vitalization or revitalization which was pretty well description of what you meant by that which is fine. But we went a step further and actually did a quantification of the vitality of each of these languages and then subsequent to that we did a similar type project using the same sociolinguistic structure in China and in the Russian Federation. So I was wondering if you think this would be of any use in further research in languages, minority languages in your case that could be carried out using a vitality measure that could monitor the situation over time? Would you think this would be of any use? Thank you. I think it is, yes, it's a good question. The vitality assessment that I showed you from UNESCO, I mean it isn't complete, right? You can use it over time and a lot of times communities put in other factors that are specifically important for them or tailor each one of those. I think there is something to be said for determining the vitality of every language. Oftentimes it's, communities are in such shape that instead of spending time really determining that, it's best to get going on things, some projects that can help to reverse language shift. But having those, you're right, having those things that we can pay gone to and say, well, this is where we are now and this is where we want to be and how do we change those and keeping track of that along the way as indicators that you're saying. I think that's really important for self-assessment in communities. I'm so sure it's as important for outside of communities to do that as it is for the community to be able to do that, to know what it is that they're indicators that they're looking for, the benchmarks and the problems getting to those benchmarks and keeping track of them as well. It's very complicated, who's keeping, who's going to determine this vitality of what community? I like to have it come from inside the community, so. Well, thank you. Sorry to say that the time has come. Quick question from Quebec City. Tooth. We have, sorry to say that the time has come for us to thank our guests, Mary and Gwen, and to thank all of our viewing parties in Canada and in Bolivia, as well as those watching from around the world. You can stay in contact with us through the International Exchange Community, and be sure to check the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and Recovering Voices websites for more information. Again, thank you for joining us today and hope that this was a worthwhile exchange.