The 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation will be held at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from March 12th-14th, 2009, with an optional opportunity to visit Hilo, on the island of Hawaiʻi, in an extension of the conference that will focus on the Hawaiian language revitalization program, March 16th-17th.
In addition, The Cultura: Web-Based Intercultural Exchanges pre-conference event features presentations by a variety of educators who have created exchanges based on the Cultura model. The Cultura project, pioneered at MIT by Gilberte Furstenberg and her colleagues, has inspired a variety of online cultural exchanges based on a set of principles and best practices. View the program.
It has been a decade since Himmelmann’s article on language documentation appeared and focused the field into thinking in terms of creating a lasting record of a language that could be used by speakers as well as by academics. This conference aims to assess what has been achieved in the past decade and what the practice of language documentation within linguistics has been and can be. One thing that has become apparent is that there is too much for a linguist alone to achieve and that language documentation requires collaboration. This conference will focus on the theme of collaboration in language documentation and will include sessions on interdisciplinary topics. It has also become clear that language revitalization requires good documentation in order to build the resources required to build a new speaker community.