"Current Challenges in Urban Language Revitalization"
Daniel Kaufman
Associate Professor of Linguistics, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center  

In this talk, I discuss the efforts of the Endangered Language Alliance in New York City to document and support several languages of immigrant and indigenous New Yorkers. After a brief overview of the ongoing project, now in its 15th year, to take stock of and map New York City's true linguistic diversity, I focus on two distinct sides in the revitalization of languages in our diaspora setting: one socio-political, and the second, grammatical. 

The first challenge is that of creating a space for languages that are not generally heard in public, despite in some cases being spoken by many thousands of people in the city. This is closely tied up with showing younger community members that it is possible to learn their heritage language despite a dearth of materials and resources. The invisibilization of certain languages in the city has been gravely exacerbated by the current political climate, in which immigrants, and especially indigenous migrants from Mexico and Central America, are being forced further into the shadows, as recent enforcement policies have made it amply clear that language and appearance are primary factors in warrantless apprehensions. 

To end on a lighter note, the second challenge I discuss relates to teaching highly complex word structure to speakers of English and Spanish, and introduces an online tool that we have developed precisely for this purpose. The tool allows linguists to create a word-building model for any language that translates from a set of basic meanings to a fully formed word while highlighting the function of each affix. This draws inspiration from the "root word method," which has been employed to good effect in the revitalization of Mohawk and other Haudenosaunee languages. 

Bio: Daniel Kaufman received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell in 2010 and prior to that, a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of the Philippines, where he specialized in the Austronesian languages of Island Southeast Asia. He is a founding co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit organization based in New York City, and Associate Professor at Queens College, City University of New York. He has contributed to the understanding of Austronesian language typology and history through a number of publications as well as helping to set a model for language documentation in urban contexts. He is currently involved in computational projects to facilitate the sharing of language documentation materials as well as the formal modeling of phonological, morphological, and syntactic systems.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom. 

The event is free and open to the public.

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics.