Language Sciences Talks featuring Dr. Henry Davis and Panel

After decades of decline, the Indigenous languages of British Columbia (and North America more generally) are experiencing a resurgence, driven by increased consciousness particularly among younger speakers of the vital role that language plays in maintaining social and psychological well-being. While it is still true today that Indigenous languages are dependent on institutional life support in the form of the education system and various levels of government funding, perhaps for the first time it is possible to envision a future where they are able to effectively compete or at least co-exist with dominant languages “in the wild”. 

In this panel, we will explore what this future might look like from the perspective of creole languages, which arise in situations of language contact, typically involving asymmetric power relations, and sometimes (as in Hawaiʻi) occupy an interstitial space between a dominant colonial language and a pre-colonial Indigenous language. In particular, does the trajectory of creolization and decreolization hold any lessons for Indigenous languages? Is creolization a danger or an opportunity for language revival? And can we harness it in language pedagogy to improve learning outcomes?

Dr. Henry Davis

Dr. Henry Davis is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. His background is in language acquisition, with a research focus for the past two decades on critically endangered Indigenous languages of BC, particularly those of the Salish, Wakashan, and Tsimshianic families. Since 1992, he has worked on the Northern Interior Salish language St’át’imcets (Lilllooet), in partnership with the Upper St’át’imcets Language, Culture and Education Society and collaboration with my colleague Lisa Matthewson. Besides St’át’imcets, he has worked directly or indirectly on a number of other Salish languages, including Northern Straits, Halkomelem, Shuswap, and Thompson, and has published comparative and historical work on pronouns and negation. Moreover, he has done collaborative research on two Wakashan languages: Nuuchahnulth, from the Southern branch, and more recently Kwak’wala, from the North. Current research on Kwak’wala includes work on argument structure with Katie Sardinha. 
 

Dr. Molly Babel (moderator) 

Dr. Molly Babel is a Professor of Linguistics at UBC. She is broadly interested in speech perception and production, with a strong emphasis on cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal inquiry. Her research program focuses on the role of experience and exposure in shaping phonetic and phonological knowledge, how social knowledge may manifest phonetically, and the mental representation of these forms of knowledge. A key part of her work examines how interacting language systems influence one another on a phonetic level, which she has investigated in bilingual speakers (English and Northern Paiute), across dialects (Australian and New Zealand English), and within dialects (American English). She also has a strong interest in language documentation and description; alongside colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, she conducted fieldwork on Northern Paiute (Numic; Uto-Aztecan).
 

Dr. Samantha Jackson

Dr. Samantha Jackson's research is in the field of sociolinguistics. Specifically, she investigates how immigrants to Canada who speak with a non-Canadian accent might be perceived as less (or more) employable when prospective employers hear them. Her doctoral work aimed at establishing phonological acquisition norms for Trinidadian preschoolers, and she is part of a cross-disciplinary team looking into how competent large language models are at communicating in written Trinidadian English Creole. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia documenting the experiences of newcomers to Canada who are engaged in remote work or gig work and analysing documents related to gig work governance. Previously, she was a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. 
 

Michelle Kamigaki-Baron

Michelle Kamigaki-Baron is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. Born and raised on Oʻahu, she is from a family of coffee pickers originally from Hōnaunau on Moku O Keawe. She is a heritage speaker of Pidgin (0.5M speakers) and a L2 learner of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (18k speakers). Growing up, she came to identify three major injustices concerning these languages: 1) Pidgin is stigmatized and its speakers are often ridiculed, especially in the classroom, 2) ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi is a minoritized language even within its own nation, 3) ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (re)-learning efforts are not prioritized by the colonial state. Her linguistics research is motivated by a community-oriented goal concerning access to ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi education for the Pidgin speaking student. Her linguistic research interests include the cognitive representations of language, the interaction between language systems spoken by multilinguals, implicit language acquisition (e.g., the proto-lexicon), language revitalization, and second language education. 
 

Angelina Rose

Angelina Rose is a 4th year student in the Bachelor of St̓át̓imc Language Fluency program at UBCO. She has a Bachelor of Education with a focus on Indigenous Education. Angelina has been dedicated to learning and revitalizing her ancestral language, St̓át̓imcets, since attending her first class in 2021. Angelina has a 5 year old son, Emmitt, who is the inspiration for her language learning.