Guest speaker: Julia Nee (University of California, Berkeley)

We are very pleased to welcome Julia Nee, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is centered on language revitalization and documentation, both with respect to case studies (Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec and on Northern Pomo) and the processes and pedagogy of the revitalization process itself. She will be giving a talk, "Language revitalization is about more than language: The role of community building in revitalizing Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec," at 3:00 PM on Friday, March 13, in SS560A.

One common barrier to language revitalization is the presence of an 'ideology of contempt' towards a language as a result of colonial and racist practices (Dorian, 1998). But the role of language ideologies in shaping language use is profound (Silverstein, 1979; Wollard and Schieffelin, 1994; Irvine and Gal, 2000; Kroskrity, 2006; among others), and language revitalization projects will not be successful in the long run if the negative language attitudes that supported language loss are not addressed (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer, 1998; Hinton, 2001; Bradley, 2002; Beier and Michael, 2018). In strategizing ways to revitalize Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec use through Participatory Action Research, or PAR (White et al., 1991; Czaykowska-Higgins, 2009; Tuck, 2009; Martin et al., 2018), involving interviews, focus groups, and photovoice (Wang and Burris, 1997) with language activists, parents, and children, one common theme that emerged was the importance not only of teaching linguistic forms and structures, but also of building a supportive community of language learners and users. In this talk, I explore how PAR was implemented in Teotitlán, and how insights gained through using this methodology have allowed for improvements to the Zapotec language camps for kids that have been hosted since 2017. Specifically, I consider speaker-learner interactions and student-generated work (such as creative storybooks) to better understand the ways in which community-building activities such as field trips to archaeological sites increase learner investment (Pavlenko, 2001; Riestenberg and Sherris, 2018) and lead to greater acquisition and use of Zapotec among children. Additionally, I respond to previous calls in the literature to expand the range of genres studied in language documentation (Meek, 2011; Vallejos, 2016), and I argue for the importance of documenting the language revitalization process itself as a way to better understand how language is (or is not) being transmitted intergenerationally.