Living Languages

With the aim of rebuilding the Dakota- and Objiwe-speaking populations in the state of Minnesota, US, the Alliance of Early Childhood Professionals provides preschool immersion. With classes at four schools in Minneapolis, children have been benefiting from this instruction since 2006. Read more in the article Revitalizing state heritage or visit the Alliance of Early Childhood Professionals site. According to the Ethnologue, there are 15,400 Dakota (dak) speakers in the US (as of 1990) and 3,880 in Canada. The Ethnologue gives a total of 79,360 speakers of Ojibwe (oji), a macrolanguage comprising Chippewa, five “Ojibwa” languages and Ottawa.

On March 25, the 1st Cambridge International Conference on Language Endangerment will be held in the UK. Sponsored by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, or CRASSH, the conference is filled to capacity, though a waiting list is available. With the themes of language documentation, pedagogy and revitalization, the conference will include talks by plenary speakers Peter K. Austin and Nikolaus Himmelmann. For more details, see the article at SOROSORO.

The University of Nebraska Press has received a grant for USD 781,900 for three years. The money is for the Recovering Languages and Literacies in the Americas initiative and will be shared with two other presses. Each press will produce nine books on endangered languages to help with language revitalization. Read more at UNL earns three humanities grants.

This entry was posted on 26 February 2011 at 03:09 and is filed under conferences, Dakota (dak), immersion, Ojibwe (oji). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.