Isabella Victoria Wolfe (NYU Gallatin) | The Language Conservancy | Indiana, USA
As I am approaching my third week at The Language Conservancy, and the mid-western atmosphere is starting to settle, I am beyond grateful for the community of Linguists I have met in Bloomington. The TLC team has been welcoming and taught me so much in the little time I have been here.
When I first arrived, I was a bit intimidated by my lack of linguistic training compared to my other colleagues, but I have realized that it was never an obstacle. One of my office buddies and Linguist, Sam, has made this an amazing learning experience, no matter how many questions I may ask.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been assigned to two projects for the languages Apsáalooke (Crow) and Cowlitz Salish. The Crow Language is in the Siouan language family and is spoken in Southeastern Montana and parts of Missouri, about 85% of the Crow Nation speaks Crow as a first language. In conjunction with the Crow Language Consortium (CLC), I am working alongside a team on developing an eLearning website called Ammiláau. Ammiláau is an interactive eLearning platform intended to supplement classroom instruction for Crow Language teachers and students, or independent study. Right now I am beta-testing the K-12 curriculum as well as marking any formatting or grammatical errors. I have enjoyed how fast I have picked up some phonological features of the language. For example, in Apsáalooke, the /k/ would be pronounced more like /g/; and there is no nasalization in Crow. For Cowlitz Salish, in the Coast Salish family of Salishan languages and spoken in Southwestern Washington; I have been working on an online dictionary, mainly editing audio entries in addition to their inflected forms, example phrases, or variants.
One of the questions I encountered in my independent project, and was continuously stumped on, was how linguists could aid a community without simultaneously invading their space. It’s often that indigenous communities are studied as a spectacle out of curiosity, and conceptualized as “stuck in time,” when these communities and the people are, in fact, continuously growing, adapting, and unapologetically perennial. What TLC has taught me is that the key lies in developing true partnerships, where linguists act as facilitators, always deferring to the wishes and expertise of the community members themselves—making the community, the focal point of revitalization.
Sincerely,
Isabella V. W.