CoLang 2024 Facilitators

Amy Fountain (Associate Professor of Practice, Linguistics, University of Arizona). Amy is the convenor of the Advancing Indigenous Language Technologies (AILT) Working group at the University of Arizona. She teaches mostly undergraduate courses in linguistics and works to support the goals of the American Indian Language Development Institute. She has been working on a web-accessible database development project with the Coeur d'Alene Language Programs for more than 15 years.  Amy is from Eastern Washington State.  She has previously taught for AILDI and CoLang.

Workshops: Basics of Database Design and Implementation, Community Archives

Carolyn O'Meara is currently an associate research professor in the Department of Indigenous Languages at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University at Buffalo, SUNY in 2010. She is especially interested in topics related to language, culture and cognition, specifically as it pertains to the domains of space, landscape, sensory perception and emotions. She combines methods from the areas of language documentation, linguistic anthropology and psycholinguistics to try to better understand to what extent language and culture play roles in shaping cognition. Of particular interest is the landscape domain, which was the focus of her PhD thesis. Since 2004, she has been working together with speakers of Seri or Cmiique Iitom, a language isolate spoken in northwestern Mexico. She has compiled and co-published various texts in Seri together with Seri speakers and has organized small groups dedicated to editing texts in the Seri language to provide material to teachers, readers and writers. She is currently working with a small language collective on adapting texts previously recorded as part of linguistic description work to be used in promoting literacy among Seri youth. She is also compiling a database of georeferenced Seri place names.

Workshops: Documenting Language, Culture & Cognition + Documenting the Language of Place and Landscape

Chris Hoshnic is a Navajo Poet and Filmmaker. A recipient of the 2023 Indigenous Prize Poet for Hayden’s Ferry Review and a James Welch Finalist, Hoshnic is also an advocate for Diné Bizaad, or the Navajo Language and has translated work for Thousand Languages Project, a Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing initiative. His fellowships include the Native American Media Alliance’s Writers Seminar, UC-Berkeley Arts Research Center Poetry & the Senses and Diné Artisan and Authors Capacity Building Institute. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Website: chrishoshnic.com 

90 Minutes Workshops: Mapping of a Metaphor: A Generative Workshop + Translation as Ekphrasis: A Generative Writing Workshop (Part 2)

Cláudio da Silva is a doctoral candidate in Sciences of Education at the University of Porto, Portugal, and a PhD fellow at the Center for Research and Intervention in Education (CIIE) of the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences at the same institution (FPCEUP). Originally from Brazil, Cláudio holds a master's degree in Social Education, Development, and Local Dynamics from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and bachelor's degrees in Biology and Pedagogy. His background includes leading various educational projects and environmental education workshops for teachers in Brazil and Papua New Guinea. In his work as a teacher at the Paulo Freire and Hiro Gakuen schools for Brazilian immigrant children in Japan, he led interdisciplinary research projects, resulting in the production of short books and community educational videos in collaboration with his students. His work in Papua New Guinea facilitated the creation of the first textbook on indigenous culture for schools in New Ireland Province. His current research focuses on analyzing intercultural dialogue between schools and indigenous communities, with the aim of the potential inclusion of indigenous knowledge and terminology in conventional school curricula. This research is being conducted in Papua New Guinea with funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), a government agency supporting science, technology, and innovation under the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education.

Workshop: Tell Your Story: Bringing Indigenous Knowledge into Mainstream Classes

Craig Alan Volker is an Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute of James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. Resident in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea, he is a Wangpaang (Assistant Talking Chief) of the Sea Eagle Clan of the Nalik people of New Ireland. He was awarded a PhD in linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi and was formerly Professor of Language at Gifu Shōtoku Gakuen University in Japan and Professor for Linguistic Research at Divine Word University in Papua New Guinea. He has a particular interest in the use of Papua New Guinean languages for modern purposes, such as formal education, books, films, and comics, and in the teaching of Tok Pisin as a foreign language. He was the general editor of the Oxford University Press Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin English Dictionary and is currently collating a dictionary of the Nalik language.

Workshop: Tell Your Story: Bringing Indigenous Knowledge into Mainstream Classes

Daisy Rosenblum is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where she works with community and local partners to develop relational technologies as the co-Director of CEDaR Space. Her work supporting communities engaged in language reclamation draws on her training as a linguist, background teaching art and literacy in elementary schools, and experience as an artist to generate methods, partnerships, and products that contribute to linguistic and territorial sovereignty.

Workshop: Documenting Conversation for Language Reclamation

Eric Jackson studied both physics and linguistics as an undergraduate at the U of A and went on to graduate study in linguistics at UCLA. Since completing a PhD in Linguistics in 2005, he has worked in southern China and Southeast Asia in community-based Applied Linguistics for SIL, an international language development NGO. This work included cooperative projects with government agencies, minority language community members, and curriculum development and teaching in a joint Masters program in Kunming. Eric is now teaching in the Masters in Human Language Technology program in the Department of Linguistics, helping students gain the skills to use computational tools for applications within natural language. Although many current natural language tools have been developed for high-resource languages like English, Eric's passion is to see these computational tools developed for language communities without huge existing datasets.

Workshops: FLEx I, FLEx II

Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins is a linguist in the Department of Indigenous Education at the University of Victoria whose community-engaged scholarship has spanned more than  30 years. Working with the nxaʔamxčín Language Program (Colville Tribes), she has been involved in constructing nxaʔamxčín nwwawlxtnt, a digital and print dictionary for nxaʔamxčín based on 1960s legacy documentation. She is also supporting the W̱SÁNEĆ School Board on a project related to SENĆOŦEN language proficiency assessment, as co-Investigator for the NEȾOLṈEW̱ Project (https://netolnew.ca/), and is a linguist team member for  ÁȽȻEȽ SĆȺ: "Heading Out to Sea" a project to digitize, archive and mobilize, for SENĆOŦEN language learning, the dictionary work of late PENAĆ Dave Elliott, creator of the SENĆOŦEN orthography.

Workshop: Blurring the Lines 

Gabriela De La Cruz-Sánchez is a PhD in Linguistics candidate at the University of Arizona. She has a BA in Languages with a major in Teaching, a MA in Applied Linguistics and a MA in Native American Languages and Linguistics. Her research focuses on Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, Language Documentation, the Morphosemantics of the NP, Lexicography, Dictionaries and Toponyms. Her goal is to contribute to the recognition of Indigenous territories and the creation of material for learners and teachers, to empower speakers and invite metis to find their way back to their roots.

Workshops: FLEx I, FLEx II, Documenting the Language of Place and Landscape

Gladys Camacho Rios is an L1 speaker of the South Bolivian variety of Quechua. She is originally from a rural village in Southern Bolivia where she inherited her native language along with its cultural values. She is a linguist; she obtained her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022. She is a community-based language researcher. In 2018, she got immersed in language documentation. She documents and describes the way elders across the Andes speak South Bolivian Quechua. She is one of the few published authors in South Bolivian Quechua (SBQ). She writes fiction stories, books for children and teenagers inspired by folk tales from the Quechuan culture in order to preserve and revitalize her L1. She is an activist. Since 2016, she leads the Linguistics Summer School of Bolivia, her grassroots initiative that teaches descriptive linguistics and documentation to younger generations in Bolivia. She is committed to fostering a pioneering new generation of Quechua and Aimara speaking linguists from Bolivia. She is currently an assistant professor in the Linguistics Department at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Workshop: Producing Community-oriented Storybooks Using Documented Data

Gus Hahn-Powell is a computational linguist at the University of Arizona, a member of the Advancing Indigenous Language Technologies (AILT) Working Group, and the founding director of the University of Arizona's online MS program in Human Language Technology. 

Workshop: Basics of Database Design and Implementation

Hali Dardar is the co-founder of the Houma Language Project, and Bvlbancha Public Access. She enjoys developing long-term, creative engagements to improve organizational process and produce community-affirming change. Her work supports process development, community-based design, language revitalization, indigenous media, and memory documentation. Former project manager for Language Vitality Initiatives at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, she has led collaborative project management and design with Shift Design Inc., and Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. She holds a BA in print journalism from Louisiana State University and an MA in Arts, Culture, and Media from the University of Groningen.

Workshops: Tech & Language Reclamation, Grant Writing, Community Archives

Heidi Harley is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She specializes in morphology and syntax (the structure of words and sentences), and in language documentation. She has worked extensively with speakers of the Uto-Aztecan language Hiaki (Yaqui, Yoeme). She grew up in Newfoundland, Canada.

Practicum: Akimel O'odham

Jonathan Geary is the Director of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians Language Department, where he directs the Tribe’s efforts to revitalize the Nisenan and Northern Sierra Miwok languages. He and his staff teach language classes for community members and Tribal employees, and create language learning resources such as storybooks, card and boardgames, and online materials. He previously worked as the Sahaptian Language Resource Developer for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, where he helped teach Umatilla Ičiškíin and Cayuse-Nez Perce. He has also volunteered with the Gila River Indian Community and Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, where he helped document Piipaash and digitized Akimel O’odham and Piipaash language media for archival. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Arizona in 2022 and has conducted research on Piipaash, Nisenan, Umatilla, Quechua, Maltese, and English. When he is not doing language stuff, Jonathan is probably watching birds.

Workshop: Reconstructing Traditional Ecological Knowledge Using Heritage Language Materials

Lucy Miller is the Mentor-Apprentice Program Manager and an in-house grant writer at the Doyon Foundation. She has a master's in Linguistics, focusing on Indigenous language conservation, from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is now a Ph.D. student in linguistic anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, working with Alaskan Dene languages and the reclamation of indigenous ecological knowledge. Lucy attended CoLang 2022 as a participant in the NSF-DLI “Strengthening Capacity in Dynamic Language Infrastructure for Tribal Nations” cohort as a Linguist Partner.

Workshop: Nankak Gwanzhih: Building Reclamation Programs Across Languages

Luiz Amaral is a professor of Portuguese and Spanish Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a lifelong language learner. His research focuses on bilingual and second language acquisition, language revitalization programs, pedagogical materials for language teaching, and computer-assisted language learning. He is currently the Director of the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Program at UMass Amherst, the chief editor of Living Languages, a journal dedicated to the revitalization of endangered languages, and the director of the Polyglot Lab. Since 2012 he has been working as a consultant in educational projects sponsored by UNESCO, Museu dos Povos Indígenas, local governments, and NGOs to develop pedagogical materials and language programs at indigenous schools in Brazil and Mexico.

Workshop: Pedagogical Grammar

Magie-Mae ȻI,ESUḰ ŦELOMIYE Adams' lineage is W̱SÁNEĆ, and Łingít. She resides on the Coastal Ts’msyen territory in Lax Kxeen (Prince Rupert, B.C.) Her background includes 9+ years of experience in provincial-level community engagement and coaching with First Nations people and organizations. She provides effective capacity-strengthening built from community-based approaches that honour the knowledge and expertise within the community. 

She obtained her Master of Business Administration from Simon Fraser University with a specialization in Indigenous Business and Leadership (MBA-IBL) from Simon Fraser University. Her previous roles have been with the First Nations Health Authority, SȾAUTW̱ First Nation, and 10 years of senior management experience in the private sector.

Workshop: Mobilizing Community Language Revitalization

Ya'at'teeh,  my name is Marilyn Reed. I am Navajo, a mother, grandmother, and a great-grand mother. My first language is Diné. I have been an elementary school teacher, a principal, a college professor and a director of a non-profit. 

When I was very young, I was sent away to school in California.  I went to school there 9 years.  In the process, my first language eroded away but fortunately,  it was never washed away. I picked it back up during my senior year in high school. I need to do that because through my language I could communicate with my grandparents and hear and take in information by other Diné speakers. I could understand so much about happenings and concerns in my family and in the community. 

I love my language. I know how important it is to pass along this love of language and culture to my grandchildren and the young people. But we all know there are best practices to do anything worthwhile. Surveying your communities to see the language needs is one of those best practices. 

Workshop: Survey Methods

Michol Miller is currently a PhD. student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She has over ten years of experience teaching English and academic writing both domestically in the US and internationally in Brazil and China. Her primary research interests include critical curriculum and materials development and teacher training for indigenous language revitalization, followed by secondary interests in place-based language learning and task-based language teaching. Motivated by her personal ongoing journey of language reclamation as a member of the Hawaiian diaspora, her research focuses on exploring ways that research in second language acquisition can be leveraged to support the language revitalization efforts of language communities around the world.

Workshop: SLA-Informed Materials Development for Language Revitalization

Mizuki Miyashita is a professor of linguistics and director of the Linguistics Program at the University of Montana. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Arizona; her dissertation was on phonology in Tohono O’odham. The current focus of her research is documentary linguistics in Blackfoot, which began with a collaboration with the late Mr. Darrell Kipp at the Piegan Institute in Browning, Montana. She has recorded lullabies and other songs, narratives, conversations, and isolated words in Blackfoot. She is currently engaged in research and outreach funded by the National Science Foundation’s Dynamic Language Infrastructure Program (NSF-DLI). Her research focuses on documentation and application of rhythm and melody in Blackfoot. She is also engaged in Community-Based Research; she established the Collaborative Language Planning Project (CLPP) with tribal language scholars in the state of Montana. She attended CoLang 2014, co-presented a plenary talk at CoLang 2016, instructed workshops at CoLang 2018, and co-directed CoLang 2022.

Workshop: Documenting Lullabies for Language Revitalization

Mosiah Bluecloud began working in Indigenous Language Revitalization in 2008. He started as an intern at the Sauk Language Department. He transitioned from an Audio and video technician to a member of the Sauk Language Department’s Modified Master Apprentice Program in 2010. After 1,280 hours of learning Sauk as an Apprentice and 668 hours of professional development training in Native Language Teaching Methodologies, Mosiah Became the Lead instructor of the Sauk Language. He taught community classes across three counties, a Sauk Language course at Bacone College, and two levels of Sauk at Shawnee Highschool. He left the Sauk Language department and got his B.A in Linguistics Spring 2016, from the University of Oklahoma, and established the Oklahoma Kickapoo Language program that fall. Mosiah built the Kansas Kickapoo teacher training program, and started trainings and workshops for language movements all over the country. He went back to school at the University of Arizona and completed his Masters in Native American languages and Linguistics in Spring 2020 and is planning to defend his dissertation over the spring 2024 semester at The University of Arizona. He has taught linguistics courses at the University of Arizona, American Indian Language development institute, and at Colang: Institute collaborative research.

Workshops: Transcription, Creative Technologies for Language, Group Mentor-Apprentice

Practicum: Piipaash

Olivia Sammons is a documentary and descriptive linguist whose community-based work is centered around long-term collaborations with Métis and Algonquian language communities. Since 2007, she has been involved in supporting grassroots Indigenous language revitalization, education, and documentation initiatives in the US and Canada, with recent projects including the development of a digital dictionary and online language course for Southern Michif (with the Prairies to Woodlands Indigenous Language Revitalization Circle), as well as collections of historical and legacy recordings (with the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma). As a graduate student, Olivia participated in the first CoLang/InField in 2008 and co-facilitated workshops at CoLang in 2016 and 2018.

Workshop: Making Dictionaries

Olivia Waring is a PhD student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa with interests in language documentation and revitalization, endangered language pedagogy, morphology, and computational linguistics. Her research focuses on developing software platforms and educational materials to facilitate community-driven documentation and revitalization. She currently works with indigenous languages in Alaska, Micronesia, and India. She also studies the use of community radio as a tool for language revitalization, and she produces and hosts a classical radio show on Hawaii Public Radio. At CoLang 2024, she will be leading a workshop on developing pedagogical content for community radio stations and podcasts.

Workshop: Community Radio as a Vehicle for Language Revitalization

Phillip Cash Cash is a member of the Cayuse and Nez Perce tribes of Oregon. He is also a fluent younger speaker of the Nez Perce language, a severely endangered language spoken in the Columbia Plateau cultural region of the Pacific Northwest. He obtained his double doctorate at the University of Arizona in 2018 in Linguistics and Anthropology. He currently serves as an Independent Indigenous Consultant on museum curatorial practice, exhibition development, repatriation, and community-based cultural advocacy and research.

As an Indigenous scholar, Phillip’s research focuses on endangered language documentation with a key interest on understanding the deeper links between language and culture. He also has extensive experience in a variety of culture-related fields of research in archeology, museology, linguistics, and tribal ethnographic field work. His most notable work experience to date is his 7 years in the Repatriation Office at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC) which focused on documenting and returning culturally-affiliated human remains and sacred objects to tribes throughout the US. Phillip also taught various language advocacy courses at the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) at the University of Arizona.

A co-authored, published volume of his on Indigenous placenames called Čáwpawá láakni ‘They are not forgotten’: Sahaptian Place Names Atlas of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla (2015) was bestowed a national award by the Harvard Project’s Honoring Contributions in the Governance of American Indian Nations and the National Congress of American Indians in 2016.

As an Indigenous artist and writer, Phillip is the co-founder of Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, an arts press and arts foundation serving US Native artists; and luk’upsíimey--The North Star Collective--a Nez Perce creative writers organization dedicated to Indigenous creative writing, performance, and publishing.

Workshop: Revitalizing Indigenous Traditions

Ramiro Vega Vargas is an L1 speaker of South Bolivian Quechua (SBQ). He was born and raised in Acasio, a Quechua Province in Northern Potosí, Bolivia. He received his BA in Applied Linguistics from San Simón University in Spring 2023. To graduate he wrote an honors thesis on 'Imperative forms in Quechua’ as spoken by Quechua-Aymara bilingual elders in Huaylloma, a rural village near his town of origin. His BA thesis was based on his own original documented data. He is currently documenting other varieties of SBQ spoken by Quechua-Aymara bilingual elders. Ramiro is a short story writer. In 2020 he won the short story competition in South Bolivian Quechua with the story “Paquma” published in Latin American Literature Today (LALT). Paquma is about a culturally representative day still practiced by people in his region called “Free day”, a day in which you share your crops with your neighbor. He is a schoolteacher; he teaches South Bolivian Quechua. He also translates texts from Spanish into SBQ.

Workshop: Producing Community-oriented Storybooks Using Documented Data

Rolando Coto-Solano works as an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and an adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. He works on computational linguistics for Indigenous languages.

Rolando comes from Costa Rica, and has studied a language called Bribri. He started his NLP work with Bribri, focusing on machine translation, speech recognition and parsing. He has also worked in New Zealand, and works with NLP for a language called Cook Islands Maori. He has focused on providing NLP for community linguists, including speech recognition and speech synthesis.

Rolando loves languages, travelling, and is excited about getting great tacos in Phoenix.

Workshops: Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages, Speech Recognition for Indigenous Languages

Practicum: Cook Islands Māori

Sonya Bird is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Victoria, in Victoria BC Canada. She has been documenting the details of pronunciation in Coast Salish languages since 2002, and has also worked on pronunciation with speakers of Dene languages, especially Dakelh (Carrier). She is particularly interested in the role of pronunciation and oral fluency in Indigenous language revitalization. Her current work is focused on supporting adult Hul’q’umi’num’ learners to speak proficiently and fluently. In collaboration with the Hul’q’umi’num’ Language and Culture Society (HLCS) and the Hul’q’umi’num’ Language Academy (HLA), she has been documenting the details of pronunciation across Hul’q’umi’num’ speakers of different generations and fluency levels, to understand what the challenges are for learners and to help design pedagogical tools and methods to overcome these challenges. On the pedagogical side, Sonya is particularly interested in exploring the benefits of incorporating phonetic analysis and “speech visualization” into pronunciation learning and teaching. She and Rae Anne Claxton (co-facilitator of the Praat workshop) have worked on this together, and she is excited to share their experiences with CoLang partipants! At UVic, Sonya has also been involved in designing and delivering undergraduate and graduate programming in Indigenous Language Revitalization (MILR), offered jointly by the departments of Linguistics and Indigenous Education.

Workshop: Praat

Dr. Stacey Oberly is an enrolled member of the Southern Ute Tribe which is located in the Southwestern corner of Colorado.  Recently, she completed a teen as a tribal council member for the Southern Ute Tribe.  Dr. Oberly has been a Ute language, endangered languages, and an Indigenous cultural and sovereignty activist for over thirty years.  She is strong proponent for endangered languages, linguistic, social justice as a means to building proactive and protective cultural identity and spirituality for endangered language community members. Dr. Oberly received her PhD. in Linguistics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.  She has two master’s degrees, one in Native American Linguistics from the University of Arizona and the other in Bilingual/Multicultural Education from the College of Santa Fe.  She also earned a Montessori Early Elementary teaching certificate from the Montessori Education Center of the Rockies in Boulder, Colorado. In her free time, she enjoys beading Ute style moccasins and designing/sewing Ute traditional clothing. 

Workshops: Intro to Linguistics Series (Phonetics/Phonology I, Phonetics/Phonology II, Morphology/Syntax I, Morphology/Syntax II)

Susan K’etsoo Paskvan was a CoLang 2016 plenary speaker on “Teaching Through Distance Education.” She taught two languages for 19 years for the Yukon-Koyukuk School District (YKSD) and administered four Office of Indian Education (OIE) grants. She wrote two curriculum workbooks through the grants, hosted summer language camps, and led professional development institutes. She wrote the original language plan for the Doyon Foundation, a non-profit educational organization that serves ten languages. She served on the Technical Working Group for OIE to guide the Indian Education program. Susan is an apprentice in the Mentor-Apprentice Program. She is working on her thesis, “Denaakk’e Place Names near Kaltag, Alaska,” for her Master of Arts at the University of Alaska.

Workshop: Nankak Gwanzhih: Building Reclamation Programs Across Languages

Susan Smythe Kung, PhD, is a documentary linguist, a digital archivist, and a co-creator of the open educational resource Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections (https://archivingforthefuture.teachable.com/). During her 11+ years as the coordinator of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA, ailla.utexas.org), she has been involved in the formulation of best practices for the organization, archiving, citation, and ethical sharing of language documentation, and she has collaborated with countless researchers, students, and community members on these activities. At CoLang 2024, Kung will facilitate “Navigating Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge,” which she developed and facilitated for the first time at CoLang 2016.

Workshop: Navigating Intellectual Property & Traditional Knowledge

TE,LI,MET,ȾTEN Glenn Jim is W̱SÁNEĆ from W̱SÍKEM (Tseycum) in North Saanich, B.C. He grew up listening to stories about the traditional lifestyle of his W̱SÁNEĆ ancestors and of the activist work his family (Elders) did for the W̱SÁNEĆ people over the last century. This cultural worldview encouraged him to look at the issues and needs of his community as he grew up, which led him to assist in those areas.

Glenn’s 35+ year career as an educator, community leader, front-line service provider, and presently, as a Revitalization Planning Coach has been guided by SNIU, the teachings of his S,ELEW̱ÁÁN, and the Elders. Sharing this cultural knowledge with W̱ILṈEW̱, the First Nations People he works alongside, has enabled him to create a special relationship with communities on their cultural revitalization journey.

Workshop: Mobilizing Community Language Revitalization

Yoshi Ono is a Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Director of the Spoken Discourse Research Studio at the University of Alberta, Canada. He explores the structure and use of language in naturally occurring speech. He is currently engaged in two large-scale collaborative projects: “never-ending sentences” in everyday speech and documentation of the Ikema dialect of Miyako, an endangered language spoken on remote Japanese islands near Taiwan.

Workshop: Audio for Everyone 

Zion Smith (Chickasaw) is a doctoral student in the University of Arizona's Linguistics Department, as well as a graduate assistant at the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI). He is a graduate of the University of Arizona's Native American Language and Linguistics (NAMA) program, as well as the University of Amsterdam's BA Linguistics program. As an independent contractor, he has worked with the Chickasaw Nation to preserve and process large numbers of conversational recordings from native Chickasaw speakers. Zion is a big believer in using technology to aid in language revitalization and reclamation.

Workshops: ELAN I, ELAN II