Guest speaker: Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada (University of Alberta)

Our department is very pleased to welcome Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta. He earned his Ph.D. in 2015 jointly from the University of Western Ontario and l'Université Lumière-Lyon 2, then spent two years as a Banting postdoc at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on documentation and revitalization of Indigenous languages of the Americas (especially of the Pacific Northwest and the Amazon), often with an emphasis on morphosyntax and/or diachronic perspectives. His talk, "Legacy text collections and their importance for communities, student training, and research", will be taking place at 3:00 PM on Friday, February 28, in SS 560A.

In language documentation, the 'Boasian trilogy' - which has come to be seen as the gold standard - refers to a grammar, a dictionary, and a text collection. Grammars and dictionaries have received substantial attention in the literature over the last 30 years, with many discussions centering on best practices for their creation and on their role in language revitalization and maintenance efforts. Text collections, on the other hand, remain understudied. Yet for many communities, legacy texts - broadly understood here to include narratives, procedural texts, songs, etc. collected in the past - constitute invaluable sources of language and culture. In this talk, I focus on the role that legacy text collections can play in the cultural and linguistic strengthening of communities, in student and community training and capacity building, and in linguistic research. While drawing on multiple examples from my work, the primary focus of the talk will be a case study on the mobilization of such a collection for Makah (Wakashan, Washington State, USA) and the potential applicability of that work to the Canadian context.