My name is Sarah, and I’m on the Pubs Team–I manage journals, journal calls for papers, TOCs, summer schools, academic papers, and dissertations. We may have met through email, or you may have read some of my blog posts about nerd stuff on the LL blog. You may even recognize that introduction from my letter last year (sorry, I still have the same job.) I’m also cross-trained in jobs and conferences and can jump on those editorial areas if other editors are out for the day.
This is my (joyless as usual) face. Guest-starring: Lir the cat!
I’ve worked at the LINGUIST List (henceforth: LL) for a couple years now, and it’s been an awesome opportunity. LL has been instrumental to my academic career in the form of funding–I came to my graduate program unfunded and tripled my student debt in less than a year. I got a graduate assistantship from LL in my second year and it basically saved me from having to drop out because of sheer financial pressure. What I mean to say is that LL is providing opportunities to graduate students like me who might otherwise have no way to participate in academia, and has been doing so for years.
I earned my MA last year in General Linguistics from Indiana University, Bloomington, LL’s host institution, and am now a member of the PhD program in the Linguistics Department at IU, as well as doubling in the Germanic Studies Department. Since starting my graduate program, I’ve been able to study Old Norse, Icelandic, Old High German, Old English, German, Gothic, ancient Germanic literature and philology, (can you tell I have a bit of a thing for historical linguistics and dead Germanic languages?), as well as branching out into Cognitive Science, in particular the intersections between cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics. It’s a pretty broad range of topics, but the overlaps in subjects have made it possible for me to specialize in a really particular niche as well as building a strong background in a range of linguistic studies.
It is pronounced /li:ɹ/. He enjoys sleeping in unusual places.
LL provides a specific and indispensable opportunity to its editors–since we interact with scholars all over the world in a huge range of specializations, and since our job involves functionally acting as a middle man for the fire-hose of academic literature and publications, we get a birds-eye-view of the trends in current linguistics in a wide range of specializations and subfields.
LL handles thousands of submissions and a gigantic amount of data day-to-day, and there’s only a handful of graduate students working diligently to keep our 30,000 subscribers up-to-date on linguistic publications, job opportunities, conferences where they can submit their research, and much more, as well as doing the hairy work of filtering predatory publishers and conferences that are likely to hurt academic careers more than help them. And it’s not just editors who work so hard to support the global linguistics community around here–keep an eye out for our WebDev team’s “fun facts” series on Tuesdays to learn more about all the services LL provides.
You might be wondering: “is she trying to solicit support for an awesome non-profit? Or just looking for an opportunity to show us her cat?” but he is a very good cat, okay? Please donate.
When you support the LINGUIST List, you support the mission the LINGUIST List stands for–the cause of creating a global linguistics community, a place to share knowledge and find resources–but you also support students like me, who wouldn’t otherwise be able to be part of it.
The theme for this year’s Fund Drive is Language Documentation and Revitalization, because of this year’s theme, I would like to tell you about some of the work that I am involved with at Indiana University in addition to working at The LINGUIST List. I am a Computational Linguistics PhD student here at and as part of my work as a graduate student I am involved with a language documentation project: building documentary materials and computational tools for Hakha Chin. It should be noted that The LINGUIST List is not affiliated with this project, rather it is work that I am doing as a student while also working at The LINGUIST List.
Hakha Chin (Laiholh) is a language spoken in Myanmar/Burma with roughly 165,000 speakers, and there are more than 23,000 Burmese refugees who call Indiana home with nearly 17,000 residing in Indianapolis. Last year Hakha Chin was the language that was studied in the field methods classes taught by Dr. Kelly Berkson. Since there are not many resources available for Hakha Chin, the motivation behind this project is simple: having access to information in your native language is not a privilege, but a right. This motivation has lead to projects like using Mozilla Common Voice for Hakha Chin.
This is a screenshot of the Common Voice homepage illustrating the idea behind their system.
Mozilla Common Voice is a project whose aim is to “help make voice recognition open and accessible to everyone”. They do this by having users donate their voice and by listening to validate other submissions. Follow this link to see the page for Hakha Chin.
Here is a screenshot of what Common Voice looks like for Hakha Chin.
The Hakha Chin Common Voice Project has gotten very popular among the Hakha Chin speaking community. Mentions of this project have appeared on the Travel Myanmar YouTube channel and on the Chin Cable Network. Below you can see our very own Dr. Berkson discussing the work that is being done with Hakha Chin on the Travel Myanmar YouTube channel.
There is a lot of work revolving around Hakha Chin at IU at the moment, and there are multiple graduate students, myself included, working on this language. For example, I am working on creating a Universal Dependencies treebank so that I can work on Dependency Parsing for Hakha Chin.
To see some other cool things that are happening in the world of Language Revitalization and Documentation be sure to check back on our blog and social media pages, but most importantly, visit our Fund Drive page – it is here where you can learn more about us and make a donation. Thank you for your continued support.
This is Nils, the web developer at the LINGUIST List, and I’ll be doing this year’s fun facts for our fund drive. I’d like to kick it off with some fun facts about our editors, the people who make sure that everything we post is formatted consistently and the content is relevant to you, our readers. Without our editors the list would get flooded with irrelevant, annoying ads and typos that sneak past our spam filters.
We all come from a wide range of places and backgrounds. To illustrate that, we’ve (almost) all written a bit on where we’re from, which you can find here. Finally, every one of the editors is also a graduate student of Linguistics at Indiana University and we all work part time in the office located just a block away from campus. This is why your donations are so important. They not only support a major source of news in Linguistics, but also a part of the next generation of linguists in their studies.
If you appreciate services provided by the LINGUIST List like book announcements, please consider donating to our annual fund drive campaign. We rely on your donations to continue operating and supporting our editors.
If you’ve already donated or just donated, thank you, we appreciate it.
I was born in Tel Aviv and grew up Eilat, the southernmost city of Israel. My father was an Italian Jew who survived the Second World War in Italy and then arrived in Israel as a teenager in 1945. My own first memory is being rushed to the shelter during the Yom Kippur War (October 1973). As a child growing up in Eilat I experienced ‘Othering’ (defining oneself vis-à-vis the other) every day, looking at the spectacular, albeit inaccessible, unreachable, mountains of Aqaba, Jordan.
Ghil’ad Zuckermann before the “Prof. Dr.” titles!
In 1987, I hosted Yitzhak Rabin (then Israel’s Defence Minister) in Eilat. He arrived there on the Day of Youth in Power, when I served as elected mayor.
During that year, in 1987 I left Eilat for the international boarding school United World College of the Adriatic (Collegio del Mondo Unito dell’Adriatico) in Duino, Trieste, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy. It was my first time overseas and since then I never stopped travelling all over the globe; the college has changed my life.
I returned to Israel in 1989 and served in the Israeli army, followed by studies at Tel Aviv University’s Inter-Disciplinary Programme for Outstanding Students.
A wheelbarrow-full of books at Oxford!
Dr. Zuckermann in a Bookshop in China, travelling the world as always
My dream to look at Eilat from the OTHER side of the bay was fulfilled in 1995 – after Jordan (Hussein) and Israel (Rabin) signed the peace accord. Rabin was assassinated in November 1995, and I left Israel for a doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1996.
From Oxford I moved to Cambridge but in 2001 I fell in love at first sight with Australia, when I was invited to deliver a public lecture on what I call the Israeli language (the result of the Hebrew revival) at the University of Sydney. At the time, I was a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore, while on sabbatical from the University of Cambridge. I returned to Singapore and Cambridge, but decided to look for an academic position in Australia. When I arrived in Melbourne in 2004, I asked myself how I might contribute to Australian society that was hosting me so graciously.
I identified two pressing in situ issues:
the exasperating bureaucracy (there are democracies, and then there are aristocracies; some people might define our Israel as an adhocracy; modern Australia was founded as a bureaucracy, and today is a professionalized one); and
the suffering of the Aboriginal people.
I said to myself: How could an Israeli professor assist in reducing Australian bureaucracy?!? I decided to invest my efforts in the Aboriginal issue.
Had I been a dentist, I would have tried pro bono to improve dental health among the Aboriginal people. I once offered a toothpick to an Aboriginal friend of mine after I shouted her a tender angus steak, to which she replied: “What is this?” “It is a toothpick”, I said. “I don’t have any teeth”, she retorted. (I had not noticed that she had chewed the steak with her gums.)
Had I been a psychologist, I would have tried to assist some Aboriginal people break their addiction to alcohol or smoking. But I am a linguist specializing in the revival of Hebrew and the emergence of the Israeli language, a hybrid language based on Hebrew, Yiddish and other languages spoken by revivalists.
So, I found a fascinating and multifaceted niche, in a totally virgin soil: applying lessons from the Hebrew revival to the reclamation and empowerment of Aboriginal languages and cultures. I decided to act in three fronts: macro, micro and “MOOCro”:
In the macro: since 2004: establishing “revivalistics”, a global, trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation (no native speakers, for example Hebrew, and the Barngarla Aboriginal language of South Australia), revitalization (severely endangered, for example Shanghainese, and Adnyamathanha of the Flinders Ranges, South Australia) and reinvigoration (endangered, for example Welsh, and Te Reo Māori in Aotearoa, i.e. New Zealand).
In the micro: since 2011: reclaiming the Barngarla Aboriginal language of Eyre Peninsula (e.g. Galinyala = Port Lincoln; Goordnada = Port Augusta; Waiala = Whyalla; all in South Australia). This is not a laboratorial enterprise. In 2011 I asked the Barngarla community if they were interested and they told me that they had been waiting for me for 50 years. How do I – a Jewish Israeli, son of a Holocaust survivor – help Aboriginal people undo what I call “linguicide” (language killing) done by English colonizers and reclaim the Barngarla language? By means of a dictionary written in 1844 by a Lutheran Christian German, Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann! This is, then, a patently cosmopolitan enterprise.
In the MOOCro, so to speak: since 2015: creating and convening a free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) entitled Language Revival: Securing the Future of Endangered Languages. So far I have had 12,000 learners from 190 countries (including Syria and Afghanistan).
I have detected three types of benefits of language revival:
Urak Lawoi is a language in Thailand undergoing revitalization efforts. Above, Prof. Dr. Zuckermann in Thailand during his involvement in the project–
The first benefit is ethical: what is right: Aboriginal languages are worthy of reviving, out of a desire for historic social justice. They deserve to be reclaimed in order to right the wrong of the past. These languages were wiped out in a process of linguicide. I personally know dozens of Aboriginal people who were “stolen” from their parents when they were kids. I believe in what I call “Native Tongue Title”, which would be an extension of “Native Title” (compensation for the loss of land). I propose that the Australian government grant financial compensation for the loss of languages – to cover efforts to resuscitate a lost language or empower an endangered one. In my view, language is more important than land. Loss of language leads not only to loss of cultural autonomy, intellectual sovereignty, spirituality and heritage, but also to the loss of the “soul”, metaphorically speaking.
South African Language Revitalization
The second benefit for Aboriginal language revival is aesthetic: what is beautiful: Diversity is beautiful, aesthetically pleasing. Just as it is fun to embrace koalas (in the hope that they have had their nails cut short) or to photograph baby rhinos and elephants, so, too, it is fun to listen to a plethora of languages and to learn odd and unique words. For example, I love the word mamihlapinatapai, in the Yaghan language, spoken in Chile’s Tierra del Fuego archipelago. The word is very precise and to the point in its meaning. Any attempt to translate it cannot be performed in fewer words than the following: “a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other will offer something that they both desire but are unwilling to suggest or offer themselves”. Despite the fact that any word in a language is translatable, there is a difference, at least aesthetically, between saying mamihlapinatapai and saying “a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other will offer something that they both desire but are unwilling to suggest or offer themselves.” As Nelson Mandela said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart”.
Language Revival efforts are underway in Namibia
The third benefit for Aboriginal language revival is utilitarian: what is economically viable: Language reclamation empowers individuals who have lost their sense of pride and at times even the reason to live. This wellbeing empowerment can save the Australian government millions of dollars that would otherwise need to be invested in mental health and incarceration. Not to mention the various cognitive and health benefits of bilingualism. For example, native bilinguals are cleverer than themselves as monolinguals; native bilingualism delays dementia by more than 4 years.
Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann’s forthcoming book, Revivalistics, Cross-Fertilization and Wellbeing: Awakening Hebrew and Other Sleeping Beauty Languages, is in print with Oxford University Press.
Professor Zuckermann’s brief bio:
Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann (D.Phil. Oxford; Ph.D. Cambridge, titular; M.A. Tel Aviv, summa cum laude) is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is a chief investigator in a large research project assessing language revival and mental health, funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).
He is the author of the seminal bestseller Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli – A Beautiful Language; Am Oved, 2008), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), three chapters of the Israeli Tingo (Keren, 2011), Engaging – A Guide to Interacting Respectfully and Reciprocally with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and their Arts Practices and Intellectual Property (2015), the first online Dictionary of the Barngarla Aboriginal Language (2017), and Barngarla Alphabet Book (2019). He is the editor of Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (2012), Jewish Language Contact (2014), a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and the co-editor of Endangered Words, Signs of Revival (2014).
He is the founder of Revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration. In 2011 he launched, with the Barngarla Aboriginal communities of Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, the reclamation of the Barngarla language.
Professor Zuckermann is elected member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL). He is President of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies (AAJS) and was President of AustraLex in 2013-2015, Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in 2007–2011, and Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College Cambridge in 2000-2004.
Prof. Dr. Zuckermann with Stephen Fry in Israel
He has been Consultant and Expert Witness in (corpus) lexicography and (forensic) linguistics, in court cases all over the globe, e.g. the Philippines, Singapore, USA and Australia.
He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shanghai International Studies University and taught at the University of Cambridge, University of Queensland, National University of Singapore, Middlebury College (Vermont, USA), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China Normal University, Shanghai International Studies University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, University of Haifa, and Miami University (Florida).
He has been Research Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science; Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Institute for Advanced Study, La Trobe University; Mahidol University (Bangkok); Tel Aviv University; Institute of Linguistics, Shanghai International Studies University; and Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo. He has been Denise Skinner Scholar at St Hugh’s College Oxford, Scatcherd European Scholar at the University of Oxford, and scholar at the United World College of the Adriatic (Italy).
A year has passed since the beginning of the last year fund drive and we ask you again: support the LINGUIST List. If we want to stay a relevant source of information, we need to keep re-inventing ourselves and invest in the re-development and update of the elements of the site and services that have served us for years. We strive to remain a source of relevant information for all of you and make your interaction with LINGUIST easy and pleasant. This year we have re-designed the submission forms and while we are still testing, we listen to your feedback and hope to have soon a simple and pretty interface. Apart from the back-end renovations, we have a new LINGUIST List web site – which contains all the same information but is easier to navigate and visually more pleasing. In the spirit of renovations and renewals, the theme of this year’s fund drive will be language documentation and revitalization. Please visit our site – to find out how to donate, to check how your university,
country or discipline ranks in the fund drive challenges, or to read thrilling stories about revitalization projects. Or go directly to the donation site (https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019). Don’t forget to leave the name of your university and your discipline in the note field to participate in the fund drive challenges!
To stay on top of the game we need your feedback but also moral and financial support. Only part of our income comes from other sources – from the support of our hosting institution, Indiana University, and income from advertisements. Please, if you read LINGUIST List, donate. Even the smallest donations matter. We cannot continue without the support of our readers.
This year’s fund drive will be run via Indiana University Foundation. It is connected with the celebration of IUDay and will last till late April. In the 6 years since we have moved to Bloomington, we have become a part of Indiana University but our main goal is to contribute to a global community. We hope the community is there for us. Let’s make it a short fund drive. Please feel free to share broadly the link to our campaign. Support the LINGUIST List.
The LINGUIST List Team:
Malgosia, Helen, Jeremy, Becca, Everett, Nils, Peace, Sarah, Yiwen
