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Language and Education

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Applied field linguistics: delivering

linguistic training to speakers of
endangered languages
a
Sally Rice
a
Department of Linguistics , University of Alberta , Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada
Published online: 22 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Sally Rice (2011) Applied field linguistics: delivering linguistic training
to speakers of endangered languages, Language and Education, 25:4, 319-338, DOI:
10.1080/09500782.2011.577216

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2011.577216

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 Language and Education
Vol. 25, No. 4, July 2011, 319338

Applied field linguistics: delivering linguistic training to speakers of

endangered languages
Sally Rice

Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

(Received 24 February 2011; final version received 30 March 2011)

As an offshoot of the Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development In-

stitute (CILLDI), the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta offers a
Community Linguist Certificate (CLC) program to speakers of First Peoples languages
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of (mainly) Western Canada. The CLC program provides linguistic analysis and lan-
guage documentation training to speakers of endangered languages interested in working
toward their preservation and revitalization. This paper describes the development of
what is essentially a training program for applied field linguists, outlines the coursework
associated with the CLC and addresses some of the impact this program is having on
speakers and instructional staff alike.
Keywords: language revitalization; Indigenous; oral language; community languages;
digital literacy; language policy and planning

Why train community linguists?

The field of linguistics has been openly and eloquently fretting about minority language
loss and death for nearly 20 years (Hale et al. 1992; Grenoble and Whaley 1998; Nettle
and Romaine 2000; Fishman 2001; Hinton and Hale 2001; Crystal 2002; Harrison 2007;
Evans 2010) also see the UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages project, first
launched in 1993.1 The hand-wringing has slowly been replaced by a rolling up of the
sleeves and, along with an increase in offerings of field methods courses and endangered
language documentation training schools on the descriptive linguistics side,2 there has
been a concomitant increase in response on the applied linguistics side: a number of
programs worldwide now offer second language training to teachers of endangered,
Indigenous languages, the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI; see
the section What CILLDI is and how it works) and the Canadian Indigenous Languages
and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI) among them. Nevertheless, a gulf often
remains between the two linguistic subdisciplinary camps as well as between them and
endangered language communities desperately in need of effective assistance to maintain
and revitalize their languages. On the descriptive side as on the applied side, linguists may
be failing Indigenous language stakeholders, but for different reasons.

Because linguists do not care?

On the descriptive side, the agendas of either theoretically driven linguists or language doc-
umentarians (whose foremost concern understandably is an abundance of archival-quality

Email: sally.rice@ualberta.ca

ISSN 0950-0782 print / ISSN 1747-7581 online

C 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2011.577216
http://www.informaworld.com
 320 S. Rice

primary data backed by meticulously noted curatorial metadata) often dictate against
rehabilitative efforts inside the speech community. Theoretical linguists rarely collect their
own data and may not know or care whether the data they analyze are from a living tongue.
By contrast, the new breed of linguist doing language documentation (Himmelmann
1998; Austin 2003; Woodbury 2003; Gippert, Himmelmann, and Mosel 2006) rarely gets
around to data analysis. The best quality data obtainable that compulsive abstraction
mysteriously removed from both the speakers and the language are paramount, either
for a later scientific end use by someone else or for preservations sake alone. There is
all too often no real feedback nor functional usefulness to the speech community beyond
a massive collection of untranscribed and uninterpretable CD-/DVD-ROMs or a digital
archive on a Web site linking sound, image and speaker demographics. This is often and
necessarily the case in many North American Indigenous speech communities because the
documentation is proceeding as a last-ditch effort to gather and stockpile information about
a language whose remaining speakers are quite elderly and whose younger generations in
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the community show no interest in the language. Under these conditions, the documentary
linguists working in the field have built relationships with a handful of Elders, but both
parties might be effectively estranged from the rest of the community. Earlier generations
of academic field linguists may have had the luxury of working with a larger and younger
group of speaker consultants, but they rarely told them why they were asking the questions
they asked or to what use the raw data that the speakers provided were put.3 Moreover,
much of the earlier published scholarly work on minority languages was incomprehensible
to the speakers who, after all, were not the intended audience.
Regrettably, many linguists continue to behave unilaterally, acting from the needs of
science, failing to be community minded nor training their students to be so, remaining
blissfully unconcerned as to whether any data they use (or recycle!) are representative or
natural and blind to any acknowledgement that categories and phenomena emerging from
linguistic analysis may have little bearing on the phenomena of interest or use to living
speakers. All too often, linguists suffer from the conceit of analyzability and assume that
while languages may not be completely regular or compositional, generalizations can be
had, albeit at a somewhat abstract and implausible cost (to linguistically nave speakers).
Traditionally, decontextualized examples illustrating some phenomenon, constructed from
linguists own intuitions, have long been taken as stand-ins for the behavior of said phe-
nomenon in all registers and by all speakers of the language. Moreover, linguists have not
been trained historically to think about issues such as frequency, naturalness or register,
and many have been loathe to separate data production from data analysis. However, spo-
ken and written registers are different and intuitions are often at odds with what the data
are really doing something that corpus linguistic studies make abundantly clear (Biber
et al. 1999). The rise of corpus-based approaches in linguistics notwithstanding (Bybee
and Hopper 2001; Bybee 2007; Joseph 2008, 687), most linguists remain indifferent to any
consideration that register, usage and typological differences among languages might have
ramifications for the applicability of our Eurocentric conception of classic descriptive and
pedagogical tools such as grammars and dictionaries, especially when it comes to outreach
to endangered language communities (McEnery and Ostler 2000 and Ostler 2009 remain
notable exceptions).

Because applied linguists do not know?

Further to this last point, on the applied side, the agendas of many educators engaged
in second language teacher training may be equally uninformed and therefore largely
 Language and Education 321

irrelevant to the belated global language revitalization effort because of an underappre-

ciation for the profound differences among languages in their structure and use. Applied
linguists rarely receive training in field linguistics or typology, and although they aim to
be practical, they often fail to hit the mark when it comes to the special properties of the
languages they hope to help save. Much of the focus on endangered language teaching is
either too generic (taking a plethora of TESL/TEFL programming as a guide) or overly
literary despite a focus on literacy being weirdly at odds with the near-universal accep-
tance of immersion methods in at least the early stages of language teaching. An English L2
model is especially misdirected when it comes to designing language programs, curriculum
materials and assessment tools since the structural mechanics of English and the environ-
mental saturation of this language could not be further from the formal and functional reality
faced by, in the present case in this paper, Canadian Indigenous languages (hereafter, CILs),
and no doubt elsewhere as well. English is a language with a long literary tradition, a deeply
entrenched set of standard orthographies (despite remarkable dialectal variation across its
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many global exponents), well-documented differences in genre and register and a lexico-
grammatical system that sacrifices morphological inflection for a surfeit of vocabulary
and rigid word order. With respect to the literacy/oralcy divide, the majority of languages
from the Algonquian, Athapaskan, Siouan and Inuktitut (Eskimo-Aleut) families that we
encounter at CILLDI have little or no literary presence and speakers lack any consensus for,
let alone an idea of, a standard orthography as there is no standard spoken variety either. Indi-
vidual communities and even individual families within those communities will manifest
dialectal differences that affect pronunciation, lexical choice, grammatical inflection and
even word order. Without the standardizing or conservativizing effect of a well-entrenched
orthography, local differences get exaggerated and speakers from neighboring communities
will be reluctant to trade language materials. Moreover, some CILs are so threatened that
they only survive in a fixed register for song, traditional narrative or ceremonial use, and no
longer in a spontaneous and innovating conversational vernacular (Standing Committee on
Aboriginal Affairs 1990). Thus, most CILs exist only as speech, with orthographic forms
(let alone a real literature) having little general currency. The development of and subsequent
reliance on a written orthography prove challenging to both descriptive and applied linguists
in the context of endangered language work. The effects and limitations of literacy are subtle
because a written representation of a language can both hamper and enhance learning.
Navigating the shoals of what written forms of language are and are not provides lessons
for descriptive linguists and applied linguists alike as they move professionally to assist
speakers with language revitalization. Linguistic analysis is only possible with visual forms
of language, be they spectrograms, phonetic transcriptions, interlinearized glosses, parsed
clauses or whole texts, because units of analysis have to be taken off-line and examined,
usually by comparing and contrasting multiple examples. Languages such as English, long
the language of scientific inquiry, have long been taken as a stand-in for all languages in
linguistic study and the global interest in learning English as a second or foreign language
has seen the proliferation of generic second language materials that are really based on
English. Anglocentrism and a focus on textual representation may actually exacerbate
any typological differences with CILs, but English may be the way it is typologically
mildly inflecting, fairly regular and highly analytic because of its long literary tradition.
Likewise, CILs may be the way they are typologically heavily inflecting, highly irregular
and extremely synthetic because of their long oral tradition (cf. Thurston 1988 and Grace
1997 for other differences between so-called exoteric and esoteric languages). Let me
address the Anglocentrism and literacy pitfalls in turn, although, as I suggest, they may be
two sides of the same coin.
 322 S. Rice

Because English apples are not Indigenous oranges!

In the Canadian sociocultural context, apple (like Oreo in African-American communities
or coconut in Afro-Caribbean ones) is an intragroup slur for a First Nations individual who
looks red on the outside, but acts or thinks in nonnative ways and so is deemed to be white
on the inside. The last thing that we need in the endangered language revival movement is
for CILs to be treated as English apples where the acknowledged and taught differences
remain superficially at the level of the most salient surface contrasts in sound inventories,
vocabulary and thematic content (e.g. picking berries with grandmother), but the substantive
lexico-grammatical differences are never addressed. This is the Anglocentrism problem
mentioned earlier. In many Canadian Aboriginal language classrooms, too much faith is
placed in the written word and representational debates frequently distract endangered
language educators from actually teaching the language. This is the literacy problem. As
we work to train community linguists at CILLDI and applied field linguists everywhere
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else, both problems need exposure in the hopes that clarity and a way forward can be gained.
The typological differences between English and the typical CIL are profound and
widespread. Those most readily apparent to nonspeakers are differences in sounds, most
noticeably in syllable structure and prosody. Although the segmental inventory of English
is fairly extensive for vowels, it features an average-sized consonantal set. By contrast, CILs
typically have a small vocalic inventory, but a rich consonantal one. CILs tend to depend on
suprasegmental changes to vowel quality, involving nasality, tone or vowel length to signal
many phonological and morphological alternations, while the precise place of articulation
of a vowel is less important. In CILs, the major responsibility for marking lexical and
grammatical contrast is via the consonants and secondary manners of articulation that
affect them, involving voicing, spirantization or the addition of an ejective release. For the
most part, dialectal differences in North American Indigenous languages revolve around
consonantal substitutions, not vocalic ones. It may well be the case that speakers do not
attend to the vowel as much as the consonant because its signal load is much smaller,
relatively speaking. It thus becomes a very important matter pedagogically that CILs have
sounds entirely missing in English or lack sounds that are prevalent in English. They also
typically have different phonotactics (arrangement of sounds) than English. The lack of
sound comparability is important in the language documentation and language teaching
contexts. Critical decisions have to be made regarding how to represent unfamiliar CIL
sounds orthographically as well as how to teach unaccented pronunciation to nonspeakers
who tend to overly rely on English as a guide.
When it comes to lexical semantics and word-formation patterns, we could say that
English is very nouny and many lexical and grammatical resources go into specifying
nominal elements. By contrast, many CILs tend to be very verby and both lack an
abundance of simple little nouns from which pronunciation exercises and basic orthographic
training can easily proceed and require a lot of obligatory inflection on their verbs. Nouns
in CILs are largely derived from verbs (that is to say, little clauses). As an illustration, the
modern Tsuutina (Athapaskan) expression for beaver is micha dikodi the one (who)
its tail is flat, rather than a simple and unanalyzable monolexical stem such as tso (the
historic word and one cognate across other Athapaskan languages). It makes little linguistic
or cultural sense to build drills around colors and numbers the former are either few in
number or figurative and therefore the size of little clauses (green = that which looks like
a leaf ). Even fairly rudimentary and standard Total Physical Response (TPR; cf. Asher
1965) exercises (put the green pencil on the red square) that contrast actions and objects
and attributes of those objects could get pretty cumbersome pretty fast in the average CIL:
 Language and Education 323

you-singular-individual
handle-sticklike-object
thing-that-one-marks-with-that-looks-like-a-leaf
onto-the-top-of
thing-that-is-cut-twice-that-looks-like-blood
put the green pencil on the red square.

Likewise, the other pet vocabulary items that typically get codified in posters, flash
cards and simple readers such as days of the week, months of the year, kin terms, animal
names and body part terms may be very long and morphologically complicated, may involve
inappropriate acculturated concepts or may impose foreign distinctions (tree vs. bush, nose
vs. his nose) or ignore inherent distinctions (older sister vs. younger sister) embedded in
the language.
Syntactically speaking, CILs frequently lack determiners and adjectives altogether the
morphosyntactic adornment that often obligatorily embellishes nouns in English. Hence,
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dogs, a dog, the dog and the dogs, may be translations of the same word in a CIL depending
on context. Thus, contrasting forms in English often converge into one ambiguous form in
a CIL. On the other hand, CILs might require markers such as evidentials and other per-
spectivizing elements that are handled only optionally in English and, if present, certainly
in a different clause. The translation equivalent of the linguistically short and simple nija-ti

S/he came I know it because I witnessed it firsthand in Dene Suin
e (Athapaskan) is
the syntactically complex biclausal expression I saw him/her come in English, a sentence
type not likely to figure in basic language lessons. English, as a relatively isolating and
analytic language, tends to handle a lot of semantic and pragmatic expression via phrasal
means, by which separate, simple (especially in informal conversation) words elaborate
the head word or verb phrase. By contrast, CILs are languages in which the verb is typ-
ically polysynthetic (highly inflecting) and propositional (carrying the semantic force of
an English clause). By way of an illustration, consider the elliptical biclausal, five-word
English sentence Let me shake your hand and compare it to its monoclausal, single-word,
five-morpheme Dene Suin
e equivalent: nilost

on, which is a conventionalized reduction
of < ni
-la-hu-s-ton (2SG-hand-OPTATIVE-1SG-clasp). The morpheme for hand, -la-,
and the let me equivalent or OPTATIVE morpheme, -hus-, have fused together. As in
this example, the typical CIL verb can and does inflect heavily for subject/object, TAM
(tense, aspect, mood), voice and even speaker point of view. Because the verb must carry
most of the grammatical marking (what morphologists call head-marking), these languages
tend to make use of both prefixes and suffixes, thus obscuring the verb stem somewhere
in the middle or end of the verb word and complicating the problem of organizing a
dictionary.
The rich verbal inflection evidenced by CILs exacerbates the imbalance between the
expressive workload of the verb in the typical English sentence and in the typical CIL
sentence in other ways, too. Beyond distribution-of-labor issues, there are simply fewer
verb stems to worry about (several hundred in the case of CILs vs. many thousand in the
case of English), but vastly more distinct and often irregular inflected forms (potentially
several hundred in the case of CILs vs. two [put, puts] to four [eat, eats, ate, eaten] in the
case of English). However, whereas English has conventionalized citation forms that neatly
translate into lemmatized headwords in a dictionary listing, CIL verbs must be inflected
(bare stems are not pronounceable to speakers) and so CILs often lack a ready-to-hand
citation form that can stand for the entire paradigm and be taught or listed as such. Worse
still, the stem may be embedded in the center or at the end of a verb word, so stripping it
of its inflection might leave behind a core unrecognizable as a verb (e.g. something akin
 324 S. Rice

to the English -ceive without its lexicalizing prefixes, re-, de-, or con-). In truth, because
English is a more analytic (isolating) language than inflecting, there is little need to do
morphological decomposition except on those words with a Latinate history that tend to
belong to a formal register. Everyday (largely Germanic) vocabulary in English tends to be
monomorphemic or bimorphemic at best. Thus, morphological analysis is not a big part
of English as a Secondary Language (ESL) curricula. Likewise, CILs are marked by a lot
of lexical vagueness and ambiguity and speakers depend on the entire collocation or full
usage context to convey the very specific intended meaning, which more often than not is
highly figurative.
Oralcy often correlates with other system-obscuring properties in these languages. A
real challenge for developing teaching materials appropriate for CILs is that oralcy can
correlate with contraction and fusion, which leads to an opacity of morphological structure
for both the speaker and the linguist. Recall the fusion of -la- hand and -hus- OPTATIVE
let me to form the syllable -los- in the Dene Suin e example above. This is akin to what
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happens with English want to or going to in expressions such as I wanna see or Im gonna
leave. In the absence of careful pronunciation or a written record of the full citation form,
wanna and gonna can remain completely opaque to learners of English (much in the way
that could have often gets reanalyzed and spelled as could of by learners and careless
undergraduates). CILs often lack these conservative and transparent alternate forms. The
lack of a written standard can mean that language innovation or at least dialectal variation
continues apace and is not mediated by the conservational influences of orthography.
Speakers contract and elide constantly, and convention and context probably play a far
greater role in comprehension than the component parts of the signal itself. For the linguistic
outsider, acquisition in the absence of true immersion is rare. Moreover, since the majority
of CIL speakers are only semifluent with a fossilized knowledge of the language, it is nearly
impossible to ascertain the extent to which contracted spoken forms may be decomposable
into units that can be consistently spelled, let alone parsed and glossed and taught to
others.
Many utterances, therefore, might best be considered as idiomatic expressions.
Without the aid of either speaker intuitions or a rich historical record or deliberately
elicited sets of contrasting meanings and forms, linguists and learners are seriously
challenged in cracking the morphological code for the majority of items in CILs. The
Kaska (Athapaskan) examples in Figure 1 are taken from fairly representative pedagogical
materials freely downloadable from the Internet. The specific lesson has admittedly
been plucked out of context, but the fuller texts provide no clue to pronunciation or
interpretation. This data set exemplifies one aspect of the challenge of how to crack
the code for outsiders. English translations accompanying Indigenous language exam-
ples may give a holistic sense of the meaning, but they do not elucidate which word
means what, nor how words are formed, nor does the orthographic rendering of the
language using unfamiliar graphemic symbols or syllabaries invite a ready pronunciation
guide. The desire to produce a written representation is not always matched by the need
to provide form and meaning cues by which learners can decipher a form, see a pattern
and induce a generalization about the language that will help them in their next encounter
with it.

Variation, and why what is sauce for the goose is not for the gander
There is neither a one-size-fits-all linguistic or pedagogical template for documenting
or teaching a language nor a monolithic Indigenous knowledge system that all native
 Language and Education 325
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Figure 1. A sample (unanalyzed) CIL conversation designed for pedagogical purposes (retrieved
from the Kaska Language Web site [2003]).

cultures equally embrace. Language attrition and loss take different paths within different
speech communities, something much in evidence in the Canadian and American contexts
(Kinkade 1991; Norris 1998; McCarty and Watahomigie 1999; Norris and Snider 2008). In
some communities, contact with outsiders and the ravages of a de-Indigenizing residential
school system have hardened the resolve of speakers to use and preserve their language. In
other more isolated communities, unaffected by contact or forced assimilation, the heritage
language is all but gone. Some dialects of a language are robust and innovating and still being
taught to infants, but otherwise losing distinctive sounds, inflection, vocabulary, idioms
and word-order patterns that characterize the language. Yet other speech communities have
conserved, as if under glass, a form of their languages that would be perfectly intelligible
to generations long past, but that have no precise and agreed-upon way of talking about
entrenched global artifacts such as the automobile, hamburger or computer; diseases such
as diabetes or hepatitis-C; or modern concepts such as sales tax, gay marriage or truth
and reconciliation committees. These frozen languages are dying with their boots on
(cf. Denison 1977) and are rarely spoken by anyone born after 1950 and seldom spoken
at that. Likewise, Elders have different attitudes toward language use. Some are relaxed
about any error-filled attempt to use the language by younger generations, are dedicated
to exclusively speaking the language with their grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
will patiently repeat themselves and even readily participate in language nests and culture
camps. Others want to take the language with them when they pass on and cannot abide
any simplified or mixed-code variants of their ancestral tongue. These Elders often berate
younger semispeakers for their poor and accented language skills, but close the door on
helping them achieve fluency.
To summarize this lengthy preamble, we linguists, applied or not, have done a disservice
to our Indigenous language-speaking colleagues by shielding them from a sense of profound
form and usage contrast between their languages and English (or French or Spanish, in the
North American context). Moreover, by only providing pedagogical templates that presume
the existence of a standard orthography and literary tradition, by glossing over dialectal
differences, by assuming that EnglishCIL vocabularies are comparable and that the typical
CIL in its morphosyntax is regular and analyzable, we set Indigenous language educators
up for certain failure. Many teachers coming to CILLDI, with a 30-year career behind
 326 S. Rice

them, say that they had no idea how much the deck was stacked against them. The need
for teacher training programs that balance an insider/outsider perspective, treat the target
language on its own terms and not as an anglicized variant, provide a way for oral programs
to succeed and help L2 teachers prepare entry-level pedagogical materials for children,
teens and adults that do not focus entirely on stereotypical word lists at the expense of
linguistic naturalness is great and cannot easily be bridged by Anglophone descriptive and
applied linguists. At CILLDI, we feel a way forward is to train speakers to be linguists
so that they can: see and articulate to others the way in which their languages work;
determine what is easy, interpretable and useful in the early stages of language learning;
help fellow speakers to be tolerant of difference; and help prepare a documentary record
that can be meaningfully turned into community-appropriate teaching materials and help
build speaker-linguist capacity in others.
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CILLDIs mandate and the implementation of the CLC

The Community Linguist Certificate (CLC), offered by CILLDI, is an evolving response
to the descriptive blindness and pedagogical oversight outlined in the previous section. I
say evolving because the content of the courses changes with each offering (based on the
languages and fluency level of the speakerstudents in a particular class) and we expect that
over time we will have more semispeakers than speakers taking our courses. In essence, the
certificate program trains applied field linguists who just happen to be speakers. Alarmingly,
we are already seeing nonspeakers charged with teaching an Indigenous language in their
communities. These overstressed individuals are struggling to learn the language, learn
about the language and learn how to teach the language at the same time they are actually
trying to teach the language in tribal schools. The CLC has been envisioned as a mechanism
for sensitizing insiders (speakers) to insights afforded by linguistic analysis so that they
can wean themselves off pedagogical templates and assumptions that are poorly suited to
highly polysynthetic, oral languages for which no standard dialect exists, for which few
learner-centered descriptions are available, for which few graded readers (or videos!) have
been developed, for which a bona fide literature is absent and for which the last generation
of speakers is rapidly aging and dying. The CLC is not designed to produce language
teachers per se, but to train speakers so that they can assist L2 teachers and others inside
the community. It is a program that produces applied field linguists who do documentary
and pedagogical linguistics in and for their home communities.

What CILLDI is and how it works

CILLDI (www.cilldi.ualberta.ca) is an annual three-week-long intensive summer school at
the University of Alberta for speakers, teachers and learners of Aboriginal languages, mainly
those spoken in the Canadian context. Modeled on AILDI, the University of Arizonas
American Indian Language Development Institute, our goal every July is to train First
Peoples speakers and educators in endangered language documentation, linguistic analysis,
language acquisition, second language teaching methodologies, curriculum development
and language-related research and policy-making. Similar to AILDI, we take seriously our
role in providing intellectual and emotional support to Indigenous language activists who
may or may not always be recognized in their home communities as they work to promote,
protect, practice and pass on their languages to the next generation. Courses are offered
during two week-and-a-half long blocks, with students usually registering for two courses
 Language and Education 327

per summer.4 Classes are long, meeting for over five hours per day for six full days and two
half days each block.
CILLDI has to be crosslinguistic and multicultural by virtue of the diverse student
population we attract during a typical summer, there may be speakers of a dozen dif-
ferent languages in residence. Beyond this, we also strive to be interdisciplinary (drawing
instructional and administrative staff from education, native studies and linguistics), inter-
generational (we typically offer ancillary programming for both children and Elders and
hope to regularly include adolescents and nonspeaker adults in the future) and responsive
to the different sociolinguistic situations faced by our students. CILLDI is in its 12th year
of operation, having delivered some 40 unique courses (80 in all) to over 330 individ-
ual students (over 850 separate course registrations) since the year 2000. Course topics
range from descriptive linguistics and technologies for language documentation to second
language teacher training, curriculum development and language assessment. Specialized
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language courses on Cree, Blackfoot and Dene languages have been offered, as well as di-
verse courses on teaching language through drama, incorporating knowledge about sacred
places into language curricula, traditional food and cultural revitalization and best practices
for recording and digitizing speech.
Despite the good intentions to be interdisciplinary and crosscultural, students and staff
alike often feel that the linguistic and educational sides of CILLDI have been at cross-
purposes or at least not as well integrated as they should be when it comes to training First
Peoples to do language revitalization work. In this, the two camps have been playing out their
historical roles as described in the section Why train community linguists?: the linguists
are not sufficiently practical or accessible and the educators are not sufficiently aware of
the profound differences between English and CILs. The linguists want to be descriptive
and let orthographic and categorial conventions emerge intrinsically from each languages
analysis, while the educators are concerned with literacy and getting the language on paper
in a transliterated version of English so that teaching tools can be produced. The sad fact is
that one-off courses in linguistics or second language teaching are insufficient. The need for
language revitalization expertise coupled with the communitys high expectations places a
heavy burden on the average CILLDI student. A scattershot approach may provide some
students with enough preliminary information for successful augmentation on their own,
but for most individuals, meaningful linguistic training must be coherent, consistent and
reinforced over several years.

The design of the CLC

As a subset of the usual CILLDI course offerings, the CLC was developed in 2007 with
encouragement and funding from Canadian Heritage (its Aboriginal Languages Initiative
program has supported a variety of community-based language projects across Canada
since 1998) as a way of providing strategic and comprehensive university-level linguistic
training to speakers of endangered Indigenous languages outside of a degree program. The
target population for the CLC is unlikely to want to pursue a full postsecondary degree as
most are near or at retirement. The CLC is a six-course, for-credit program of study that
is usually delivered over the space of three summers during CILLDI and awarded by the
Faculty of Arts. Students typically take two courses per summer in the order indicated in
Table 1. The CLC courses are delivered to classes of heterogeneous speaker populations,
so no single language becomes the focus of the instruction. So far, CLC students have had
to be speakers of their own language. This way, they are able to concentrate on learning
 328 S. Rice

Table 1. The six courses that make up the CLC at CILLDI.

Block I
Year 1 LING 111: Introduction to linguistic
analysis for Indigenous language
revitalization. Central concepts of
linguistics: linguistic categories and
structure (phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax and semantics)
with special attention to CILs.
Year 2 LING 212: Morphosyntax of
Indigenous languages.
Morphological structure and
meaning in CILs including how best
to represent lexical meaning and
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Block II
LING 211: Phonetics of Indigenous languages.
Recognizing, transcribing and producing
speech sounds using the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); problems in
phonetic analysis, elementary acoustic
phonetics and techniques for describing the
sound system of CILs.
LING 213: Sentence and discourse patterns of
Indigenous languages. Types of sentence and
discourse patterns in CILs; attention to real
language use across different genres (e.g.
traditional stories, conversation, personal

form in a dictionary, how new words
might be coined and how these
languages with their complex
morphology and verb systems
might be taught to adult learners.
Year 3 INT-D 318: Techniques for
endangered language
documentation. Provides CIL
speakers with the technical skills
needed to digitally archive their
languages in a database or on the
Web with text, sound, images and
video. These digital resources can
be incorporated into interactive
multimedia resources for access by
community-based learners and
second language teachers.
narratives, oratory and ceremony) so that
students can go on to collect and transcribe
samples of language in context rather than
word lists or sentences in isolation.
INT-D 311: Language policy and planning for
Indigenous language communities. Language
use and attitudes about language within the
sociocultural context of Canadian Indigenous
communities; addresses issues surrounding
the health and survivability of Indigenous
languages in different types of family,
community and school contexts; special
attention given to Indigenous language
advocacy at the family, band and international
levels. Training in effective grant-writing
techniques included.

about linguistics and language documentation techniques rather than on the structural
and meaning patterns in their own language, which, though tacit, are at least familiar.
Although much of the course content is necessarily generic and proceeds by highlighting
how languages contrast, the in-class exercises and assignments involve strategic elicitation
of language examples by the speakerstudent and subsequent analysis of those elicited
utterances by him or her. Class exercises and assignments emphasize portfolio building of
materials that can be easily returned to the community and explained to other speakers and
learners in order to develop and strengthen capacity locally, as well as plan and implement
effective language revitalization programs. There are no exams, and students are assessed
on their performance on the basis of in-class exercises and take-home assignments. Students
routinely work individually and collectively at the board, sharing knowledge of their own
languages as well as commenting on some aspect of other languages in the classroom.
They also get practice while speaking in front of a group by giving presentations, usually
with the help of graphic presentation software, or by navigating through their newly created
language Web sites. This may not seem very remarkable, but the majority of our CLC
students, being speakers, are well into middle age and many have had no prior contact with
a computer or recording device. By the end of the program, they know how to edit and
transcribe digital sound and video files, create documents, fill in online grant proposals,
prepare glossaries and articulate to others the value of their work and the need for more
 Language and Education 329

community and governmental support. The purpose of the remainder of this paper is to
convey a sense of the training that they receive.
All members of the CLC instructional staff are seasoned field linguists with extensive
community experience. Theoretically, they could be described as adherents of less formal
and more empirical and usage-based approaches and many have extensive corpus linguistic
backgrounds. Having a corpus linguistic mind-set has consequences for how one approaches
a language, both analytically and pedagogically. Ones expectations about how much of a
language is literal or analytic or transparent versus figurative or synthetic or idiomatic
shift when one looks at connected discourse as a starting point and not only at isolated
words and phrases. With corpus data, one is less likely to approach a language (even
English!) as an orderly set of grammatical patterns into which lexical items get plugged,
and more as a collection of different-sized collocations with differing degrees of openness
(productivity) and fixedness (idiomaticity) (Goldberg 2006; Bybee 2007). A corpus mind-
set is more likely to make one tolerant of the effects of context on the form and meaning
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of an utterance, on the role that frequency plays in inducing morphological regularity

as well as phonological and grammatical change and on differences between registers
and idiolects. Finally, having familiarity with constructing and using a corpus means that
language examples that illustrate some linguistic phenomenon or preferred collocations of
a particular word can be readily called forth from a digital database. Applied linguistics has
long embraced corpus linguistics for its efficacy in language teaching (Wray 2000; Conrad
2004; Sinclair 2004). The CLC training that we provide at CILLDI advocates strenuously
for our budding applied field linguists to document their languages in a way that will lead to
the development of representative and consistently transcribed and tagged language data,
which could then be turned into corpora usable by other speakers, learners and language
teachers in their community. To that end, each CLC course (enrollment per course ranges
from seven to 24 students) has at least one teaching assistant (TA), usually a graduate
or undergraduate student in linguistics, who can assist instructors by recording sample
data discussed in class as well as provide tutorial assistance to students in both analytical
concepts and technological protocols. Our goal is for graduate students who have served
as TAs in several CLC courses to assume some principal instructor duties subsequently,
a goal first realized in 2009. Students and TAs work closely together during CILLDI and
many opportunities for later research or pedagogical collaborations back in the community
have emerged through these CILLDI relationships. Just as the CLC allows linguists to help
speakers strengthen the record of their languages so that they might have a greater success
of being passed on, the CLC allows speakers to help linguists train their students to be more
community minded and possibly actualize the prevalent but too often only virtual concern
to help save dying languages.

The CLC courses

In developing the program, we assumed that the holder of the CLC would likely be called
upon by his or her community to lead any local language documentation, maintenance
or revitalization efforts. In addition to the expected work of dictionary, grammar and text
production, certificate recipients would probably be tasked with projects such as refining
orthographic systems and promoting them to speakers, recording Elders and transcribing
their stories, serving as an interpreter, digitizing oral texts, conducting language use sur-
veys, developing planning and policy documents, writing language-based grant proposals,
promoting public awareness, working with local Elders and teachers to develop language
curriculum materials, offering language classes for adult learners, producing a community
 330 S. Rice

newsletter in the Aboriginal language, running language and culture camps and assisting
the band administration in implementing language policy in communities and schools.
Thus, both extensive technical and applied skills would be required of the community
linguist and the CLC was designed with a threefold purpose: (1) to provide an opportunity
for participants to gain in a systematic and thorough fashion the technical and analytical
knowledge to document their language and produce language materials of potential benefit
to language educators and adult language learners in their communities; (2) to acknowledge
the specialized nature of this training through a provincially recognized certificate that will
have currency in tribal schools and band offices; and (3) to be a ladder for the eventual
pursuit of postsecondary or postgraduate studies in linguistics or language education by
speakers of Aboriginal languages who lack a high school diploma. This last goal has proven
to be more remote than we had hoped. The majority of our CLC students, being speakers,
are middle aged or older. Many are retired teachers and are enrolled for reasons of personal
interest rather than for vocational purposes. Nevertheless, we feel that they are poised to
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become super Elders in their communities as knowledgeable speakers who can document
their languages and further develop their own oralcy and literacy as well as influence the
direction of local language programming.
The CLC courses needed to develop linguistic expertise as well as proficiencies to
support effective language activism. In broad strokes, they needed to deliver the following:

r the basics of linguistic analysis for the full range of linguistic phenomena;
r a convincing demonstration of the special properties of First Peoples languages;
r best practices in representing First Peoples languages (in all their varieties);
r exposure to language documentation technologies; and
r help with advocacy and funding resources.

The six courses that were eventually developed to comprise the CLC are much like a
highly compressed undergraduate minor in linguistics. However, the training is specific to
the students target language, but the larger goal of stemming language loss permeates our
purpose. The CLC courses are listed along with their University calendar descriptions in
Table 1.
Each course is accompanied by its own spiral-bound course pack, containing extensive
lecture and discussion notes, technical glossaries, language maps, generic and language-
specific International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) charts, sample syllabaries and roman or-
thographies, analyzed language examples, in-class exercises and other assignments that
help the student elicit a data set relevant to a particular phenomenon, explicit instructions
for deploying various software packages used in the course and pointers to publications
and Web resources. We keep the cost of these materials to a minimum and make sure that
each student leaves at the end of the Institute with all their graded assignments, copies of
group exercises and other materials (keyboard layouts, publically available software, digi-
tized recordings and transcriptions, texts, etc.) that can be shared with others back at home.
Because we have had speakers of nearly two dozen different CILs taking linguistics classes
at CILLDI over the past decade, we have amassed quite a record of language examples in
our archive. These data are available to instructors and students alike. They provide ready
examples of certain phenomena such as full inflectional paradigms, contrasting clausal pat-
terns or sample stories transcribed and linguistically glossed, which can be used to model
new data sets. Since the courses leading to the CLC are predicated on the assumption
that students are speakers, many class activities involve guided elicitation of data sets (e.g.
 Language and Education 331

my father, your father; I am falling, I fall a lot, I just fell, Im about to fall) from which
generalizations can be induced. Many past examples make their way into course packs.
Some of our CLC participants have remarked that these materials are the first time that they
have seen their language in writing or, in seeing a phonetic transcription or interlinearized
gloss of a word or sentence in their language, it is the first time they have thought of their
language as worthy of scientific study. In what follows, I briefly elaborate on the content of
the CLC courses.

Introductions
LING 111, the introductory linguistics course to the CLC, involves demystifying what
linguistics is, what linguists do and what insights a speaker can gain from thinking about
his or her language linguistically (naturally, we pay lip service to this at the outset and hope
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that by the end students are convinced). It is also a course that must take the fear out of
being away from home, on a university campus and with a group of strangers who may or
may not speak their own language and with whom they will likely be spending the next
three summers. There is more emphasis on illustrating phenomena from examples in the
class than on exhaustive discussion of this or that analytical category. Students get a taste of
seeing their language represented phonetically and orthographically, but more importantly,
as an object of inquiry and a precious human resource that needs and deserves multipronged
support.

Sound
The LING 211 course, Phonetics of Indigenous Languages, over its eight days focuses on
the following: (1) articulatory phonetics (including the anatomy of the speech apparatus and
understanding the relationship between speech production and the IPA), (2) transcription
(learning the IPA representation for their language, understanding the differences between
orthography and transcription, discussing best practices in creating orthographies, learning
about keyboard layouts for word processing and practicing transcription of the language) and
(3) acoustic phonetics (working with digital recording equipment, best practices for making
good quality recordings, learning the basics of visualizing sound and doing transcription
using the Language Archiving Technologys (LAT) multimedia annotator tool, ELAN,
retrievable at http://www.lat-mpi.eu/).

Meaning and structure at the word level

LING 212, Morphosyntax of Indigenous Languages, concentrates on the following: (1)
morphological analysis (learning the basic patterns of word formation in each students
language to compare with other languages, both Aboriginal and European, studying in-
flectional and derivational relationships between words based on the same stems and un-
derstanding the basics of interlinearization parsing and glossing words into their ordered
component parts), (2) lexical semantics (meaning relationships between words, basics of
word formation and meaning extension, especially involving metaphor and metonymy, and
coining new words for new concepts in ways consistent with the language historically), and
(3) best practices for CIL dictionaries (determining properties of the best dictionaries for
specific audiences and purposes, building a sample dictionary and becoming familiar with
dictionary-making software). Students tend to report that this is the hardest course in the
entire CLC program, which is not surprising since they must immediately come to terms
 332 S. Rice

with how different the bricks and mortar of their languages are from English as they are
struggling with producing a representation at the word level, which sometimes cannot be
true to both the pronunciation and the morphological structure of the word at the same time.
They realize that with a written form of the language, they can peer into complex words
and take them apart semantically and morphologically and even put them back together.
They soon see relationships among words in their language or even among cognate forms
in related languages in the class.

Meaning and structure at the sentence and discourse levels

LING 213, Sentence and Discourse Patterns of Indigenous Languages, takes aim at the
following: (1) sentence structure (understanding the inflectional and word-order devices that
the languages use for marking verbs and event participants in simple clauses and recognizing
and describing the different types of sentences, including complex clauses), (2) meaning
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relations (analyzing grammatical markers used for different types of utterances, from
statements and questions to conditionals and hypotheticals and taking stock of rhetorical
devices and other discourse particles that allow a speaker to indicate ones point of view), and
(3) discourse analysis (seeing how sentences in text or narrative are connected to make the
overall discourse cohesive; exploring different genres of narrative such as personal histories,
traditional legends, conversation, oratory and ceremony if appropriate; transcribing and
glossing an entire text; and becoming familiar with corpus creation and analysis software).
In a very real sense, this is the capping course for the strictly linguistic portion of the CLC.
LING 213 is designed to integrate the linguistic knowledge gained in the earlier classes so
that the CLC students can go on to collect and transcribe samples of language in context
rather than word lists or sentences in isolation. The message throughout is that connected
discourse even conversation with its attendant use of elisions and false starts is the real
language, and the best language documentation and best resources for pedagogical material
come from what speakers actually do. In 2008, students in LING 213 adapted the cartoons
on a newspaper comic page by substituting natural expressions in their own language
(Figure 2). The comics are a very informal, but highly conventionalized conversational
genre. They capture slang, phatic devices, pronominal and perspectivized language use in
an appealing format, while the graphics help the reader interpret the content.

Strategic (and digital) language documentation

INT-D 318, Technologies for Endangered Language Documentation, just as INT-D 311, is
listed with an interdisciplinary studies course number. Neither course requires the linguistic
training provided in the other four courses and we wanted to encourage students not pursuing
the CLC (who may not be speakers of an Indigenous language) to be able to take and benefit
from these courses. In INT-D 318, the emphasis is on culturally appropriate use of language
documentation techniques within a community. Training is provided in the fundamentals of
digital audio and video recording, how to do time-aligned transcription, how to ensure long-
term preservation of the resulting language materials that have been collected and digitized
and how to integrate the products of language documentation into the practical aims of
a communitys language program. Students get some exposure to corpus analysis and
Web-design software in addition to sound editors, transcribers and Web-delivery programs.

Strategic (and fundable) language programming

INT-D 311, Language Policy and Planning for Indigenous Language Communities,
gives students an international policy perspective on the endangered language situation,
 Language and Education 333
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Figure 2. A sample (analyzed) cartoon in Cree (Algonquian), prepared for LING 213 (in 2008).

addressing global issues such as language contact, linguistic ecology, language shift and lan-
guage maintenance, while helping them to build language activism capacity in themselves
and in their community. It outlines methods of assessing and interpreting language vitality
and speaker fluency. It fosters a discussion of ethical issues, targeting the responsibilities
and roles of various participants in language revitalization partnerships (usually between
tribal and academic groups). The course also examines successful language revitalization
programs and grant proposals, and helps students: develop projects (by helping the speaker
articulate what he or she is doing or wants to do in a specific proposal); prepare a budget;
establish objectives, time lines and assessment tools for outcomes; and write both a grant
proposal of their very own and sample press releases to publicize their communitys actual
or intended efforts.

The ethos of the CLC and preliminary outcomes

In a very real sense, since the implementation of the CLC program in 2007, we have
seen a change in attitude by speakers of Indigenous languages attending CILLDI from
linguistics is hard to how can you teach a language without linguistics? Despite initial
trepidation from some CILLDI colleagues that linguistics training is too technical, in-
compatible culturally and not immediately relevant to Indigenous language teachers and
endangered language revitalization efforts, we have seen huge increases in registration for
the CLC courses and a real hunger for follow-up programming in linguistics. We have also
seen the advent of similar programs at other universities in Canada.
The CLC program is aimed at speakers who have come to an urban center for training,
but who intend to return to their home communities. Thus, it is a linguistics program
 334 S. Rice

that trains field linguists who just happen to be speakers. It is also a program that helps
these budding field linguists produce community-ready language portfolios (mini sketches
of their language) through strategic elicitation followed by practical data analysis and
informed, but intuitive explanation. Thus, it is a program that trains applied linguists who
just happen to be interested in language documentation and revitalization. CLC students
receive exposure to a full spectrum of linguistic and sociolinguistic concepts. They are
also encouraged to develop networking opportunities with language activists from other
communities, agencies and universities. Since we are training our students to be applied
field linguists, we also need to arm them with convincing arguments and tolerant attitudes
about reversing language shift for their language teacher and speaker colleagues, as well
as for their political leaders and nonspeaking parents of young children back home. We try
to instill in our CLC students a certain ethos about and rules of thumb for doing linguistic
analysis. We hope that this relaxed outlook helps our community linguists retain a sense of
humor, priority and balance that can be conveyed to others with whom they collaborate.
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Rules of thumb in language documentation and linguistic analysis

First and foremost, we try to allay fears in our CLC students that linguistic analysis is
harmful or disrespectful to the language. We use an analogy that speaking a language is
like driving a car, while doing linguistic analysis is like servicing it: we have to take the
language off the road, so to speak, put it up on blocks, see how all the component parts work
together and, if need be, take them apart. However, we can and do put the analytical units
back together and reassure them that they will always be able to separate the speaking in
and the thinking about the language. Unlike the majority of academic linguists who cannot
speak the languages they work on, as speaker-linguists, CLC students have the advantage
of insider insight and outsider perspective. To be a linguist means to be able to find a pattern
in a jumble of data and, possibly, to be able to second-guess with the right transcription
the pronunciation, structure and meaning of an unfamiliar word or expression even if it
comes from a completely foreign language. The ability to read off a pronunciation from a
phonetic transcription or meaning from an interlinearization is quite empowering to new
linguists.
Linguistic analysis is all about contrast and comparison. By comparing slightly dif-
ferent items (similar items in related languages, acceptable and unacceptable items, items
pronounced slowly in isolation vs. rapidly in context and the same stem with different
affixes), one gains a point of reference and a way into the language. A transcription and
loose translation, as in Figure 1, do not provide sufficient clues for deciphering what is
going on in a language or what morphologically complex forms mean. One cannot learn
or learn about a language via translation; one needs controlled data sets wherein contrasts
are introduced slowly and morphological parses and glosses of the component parts are
available. However, a language will retain many secrets and some expressions will remain
unanalyzable. It is perfectly acceptable to not have answers to every question as many
aspects of a language cannot be figured out or understood. After all, languages except
perhaps for the most obsolescing are constantly undergoing grammaticalization, reanal-
ysis and relexification. Usage, including frequency effects and contact with other speech
communities, is constantly etching the shape and sense of an expression, not to mention its
preferred context of use. In opaque cases, expressions are best considered to be idiomatic
and simply analyzed wholesale. With regard to representation, consistency is key and it
is unrealistic to think that an individual or a small committee can develop and impose a
standard orthography, a lexicon or grammatical rules on oral languages undergoing rapid
 Language and Education 335

attrition and loss with such a historically shallow written tradition. We try to inculcate our
CLC students with the following rules of thumb:

r a language is a living system, albeit an irregular one;

r languages change and (dialectal, generational) variation is normal;
r if languages do not change, they atrophy and die;
r languages are not literal; if they were, they would never change;
r languages (in their use of form) underspecify (they do not signal everything);
r languages can be very redundant (they can signal the same thing in several places);
r a language is not a list of words, a set of verb paradigms or a collection of stories
neither teach these exclusively (if at all!), nor stop ones documentation here;
r every analysis is a work in progress (all analyses can and should be revisited as more
is discovered about the language);
r neither one speaker nor one linguist can know everything about a language; and
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r contrast helps, context matters, collaboration is essential.

Initial impacts
As of July 2010, 41 students representing eight languages (from the Algonquian, Atha-
paskan and Siouan language families) and over a dozen speech communities have suc-
cessfully completed the necessary coursework and earned the CLC. Twelve of these 41
students began taking CILLDI linguistics courses years ago, but returned after the program
was inaugurated to complete the CLC. After four years of offering the full CLC course
complement, we can begin to take stock and consider whether the training of applied field
linguists in the form of CLC holders is having an impact. Using the crudest of measures,
attrition and completion, we have seen only a half dozen individuals who completed two
thirds of the program not return for the last summer of courses. As most of these students
had bursaries, we attribute most of these absences to economic considerations and band
administrators who refused to offer leave or leave with pay for individuals who still have
extended families to support. Overall, of the 39 individuals who started the program in
2007 or 2008, 29 (74%) have graduated. Of those individuals, we know that at least two
are involved in maintaining and expanding online community dictionaries, three are work-
ing as their communitys language coordinator (while another five are part of language
revitalization teams), eight have returned to language teaching, four are retired and have
now devoted themselves to language work on their own, two are freelance linguists doing
recording/transcription and materials development and one has started a graduate school.
We know there has been an obvious consciousness-raising and recruitment effect within our
students home communities because we increasingly see new individuals from the same
communities attending CILLDI classes in subsequent years. There are at least 16 reserves
across Canada (five in the Northwest Territories, six in Alberta, four in Saskatchewan and
one in Nova Scotia) from where multiple CLC students have attended. Language revitaliza-
tion work is lonely work, and having a critical mass of fellow activists increases the chances
of effective advocacy, language programming and documentation. In 2011, we anticipate
the return of two former CLC students as coinstructors at CILLDI. Our long-range goal is
the complete indigenization of the Institute.
Although the full effects of this experiment in delivering intensive linguistics training
to community members cannot be known for some time, we do know that the CLC pro-
gram is already changing the face of CILLDI. Along with high completion rates there are
healthy return rates. Among the 28 respondents (out of a total of 48 students attending the
 336 S. Rice

2010 Institute) to our annual questionnaire, the desire for refresher courses was strong
and the percentage of respondents expressing interest in taking related courses was very
high to the point that we will likely offer some of these in the near future: Building
your Community-Based Dictionary Cover-to-Cover (46%), Planning and Developing
Community-Based Language Projects (57%), Oral Languages, Aboriginal Literatures,
and Storytelling (71%), Best Practices for Recording and Digitizing Speech and Video
(68%), Animation for Language Revitalization (54%) and Corpus Linguistics for Endan-
gered Language Documentation (40%). In addition to new course requests, we are seeing
an effect on instructors and graduate students, both in terms of how their own research is be-
ing redirected in the teaching invitations they receive from other institutes and in the service
outreach they are engaged in (conducting follow-up workshops that target orthographies,
transcription and recording practices in communities; consulting with former students; lob-
bying corporations, casinos and various levels of government for more endangered language
funding; etc.). The CLC has also been a strong recruitment tool for potential graduate stu-
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dents and postdoctoral fellows in the Department of Linguistics and, in a very real sense, the
past attitudes and practices of linguists caricaturized in the section Why train community
linguists? are receding. The CLC is allowing us to cultivate applied field linguists among
our own graduate students. Their expertise is evolving in an explicitly collaborative context
and as they serve as tutors, TAs and increasingly principal instructors, they are de-
veloping contacts for future field experience and research that will likely last their entire
careers.
In our initial proposal to Canadian Heritage for funding to start the CLC, we listed four
objectives, all of which we have met:

r create a cadre of community-based and linguistically trained Indigenous language

workers and activists in Canada;
r encourage some speakers to consider further training in linguistics;
r provide models of communityuniversity collaboration for speakers and graduate
students; and
r give undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to tutor, TA, or teach the
CLC courses and build relationships with various communities.

We think we have also been successful in reversing an attitude that linguistics training
is not as critical as teacher education within endangered language speech communities.
Rather, we have come to a point where speakers understand the power of linguistics
to make the random and incomprehensible in a language accessible and thereby help
them gain a new respect for their language as its mysteries and beauty and power are
revealed. This posture guarantees that in an endangered language community with
a community linguist in residence, there will be at least one defender who can help
others save their language from the inside out. In the words of one of our former CLC
students:
e-atoskata-man tansi Nehiyawewin epikiskwe-makaki kitaskina
I work at how Cree-language speaks-well on our land
Im a community linguist.

Notes
1. Thanks to my fellow CLC instructors who have taught at CILLDI over the past four years and
inspired me with their good will, dedication and graceful pedagogical styles: Jordan Lachler,
 Language and Education 337

Darin Flynn, Ben Tucker, Margaret Florey, Chris Cox, Melissa Axelrod, Joyce McDonough and
Anne-Michelle Tessier. I acknowledge with gratitude helpful comments made by reviewers of an
earlier draft.
2. Such as InField, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project workshops and seminars
at SOAS, the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Educations degree programs and the
3L Universities of London, Leiden and Lyon Consortiums International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description.
3. I exclude missionary linguists from this characterization.
4. CILLDI courses are offered by the Department of Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts, the Depart-
ments of Elementary and Secondary Education in the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of
Native Studies. Registration in courses is through Open Studies (which does not require a high
school diploma) and is restricted to CILLDI program participants, although a few students may
be registered in degree programs.
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