On February 3rd, Jessica Coon (McGill) gave a guest lecture entitled Linguistics and Language Communities in LIN490: Special Topics in Linguistics.
The special topics class is a graduate seminar with a specific topic that changes by year, with this year’s topic being Transcription as a tool for community language revitalization. The course is taught by professors Tahohtharátye Joe Brant and Susana Béjar.
Jessica Coon is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. Her research focuses on variation in human language and understudied Indigenous languages of the Americas. Professor Coon had heard about the LIN490 course from it being highlighted on the department Instagram page.
The focus of the talk was the intersection of minoritized language community work and work being done by theoretical linguists in the context of the global language endangerment crisis, i.e. how academic work can be integrated with community initiatives to benefit the language community and preserve the language.
Professor Coon gave a breakdown of past initiatives in Kanien’kéha, highlighting the success of community endeavours, and the shortage of learning material for advanced learners. The initiatives include a course Jessica Coon taught at McGill that paired up advanced L2 learners of Kanien’kéha with little linguistics experience and linguistics graduate students with no Kanien’kéha experience. She also discussed a project to create a corpus by transcribing Indigenous radio talk shows, while also training community members in transcription. She outlined the challenges of this project, including the difficulty of transcription and questions about access and permissions of resulting materials.
The presentation concluded with a reiteration of the importance of continuing and future initiatives and breaking barriers between linguists and community members.
A very big thank you to Jessica Coon for the guest lecture! We are fortunate to have great guest speakers to elevate the special topics class.