Language Sciences has articulated five key research challenge areas of focus for interdisciplinary research, including 'Supporting Community-Engaged Language Survivance' (SCELS).
Drs. Christine Schreyer and Daisy Rosenblum currently serve as the Co-leads for this research challenge area.
Why 'Supporting Community-Engaged Language Survivance'?
British Columbia is home to 34 of the 70 distinct Indigenous languages in Canada, all of which are at risk of being lost within one generation, with the majority of fluent speakers 70 years of age or older. Bill C-91, the Indigenous Languages Act, recognizes the “urgent need to support the efforts of Indigenouks peoples to reclaim, revitalize, maintain and strengthen” these languages and calls for “research or studies ... for the purposes of supporting Indigenous languages.” However, despite growing numbers of motivated adult learners and language activists, Indigenous and other communities worldwide lack suitable technological tools designed for intergenerational transmission of language and culture, as well as accessible documentation, analysis and narrative tools.
This challenge addresses the need for effective tools to support the community-led maintenance, revitalization and reclamation of language and culture as a human right. Research and knowledge mobilization strategies include the development and advancement of multimodal documentation of community-held knowledge, effective mobilization of this documentation using narrative new media, user-centered stewardship of digitized and born-digital language data, investigation of natural language processing of low- resource languages with typologically unusual grammars, management and stewardship of sensitive language data, and the development and evaluation of extended reality tools for teaching and learning language.