Collaborative Research: Institute on Collaborative Language Research

This award supports the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang), jointly hosted by Arizona State University (ASU) and Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC), a federally recognized tribe. CoLang takes place every two years, bringing together academics, community scholars, and indigenous language activists to provide training in language documentation, revitalization, and collaborative practices.

Because ASU is situated on the ancestral homelands of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash, the two Native American societies and languages that comprise the SRPMIC community, the theme for CoLang 2024 is "Creating Partnerships, Honoring Neighbors, Building Capacity". This theme represents a step in the evolution of social science, where educators and indigenous scholars meet, learn, and do research in a setting shaped by the collaborative vision of an institution of higher learning and a tribal-run language program.

CoLang 2024 serves as a model for productive and sustainable partnerships between neighbors, and for how major American research universities such as ASU can engage with their tribal neighbors in a meaningful way.

CoLang responds to the needs of a diverse group of participants: academic linguists who want to gain technical skills, linguistics students who need basic training in collaborative research in language documentation, language teachers who wish to train themselves in basic linguistics skills, and community language activists who work on maintenance and revitalization projects for their communities. The institute consists of two weeks of intensive workshops on a broad range of topics in linguistics, language documentation and revitalization, education, and technology, with an emphasis on community-based participatory research.

This is followed by two weeks of in-depth practica, where the participants apply their newly acquired skills and develop focused research projects. Previous participants have incorporated their institute experiences into documentation projects and community revitalization activities worldwide. The institute builds capacity, skills, and methods that result in career advancement, outputs, projects, and generating new linguistic methodologies and research.

These include grants, graduate theses and dissertations, books, academic articles, language archives and databases, project development and cross-community networking methodologies. Linguists and academics who complete CoLang come away with an understanding of the importance of community-based language work. Language activists who complete CoLang are equipped with skills that help them make meaningful, productive, and sustainable contributions to the language reclamation efforts of their communities.

This award is made as part of a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure – NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.