Breath of Life Workshop for California Indian Languages

June 8-15, 2008

Hosted by
The Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival
and
The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Berkeley

Apply online!
http://www.aicls.org/pages/BOL08app.htm

The "Breath of Life – Silent no more" California Indian Language Restoration Workshop will be held this year on June 8-15, at the University of California at Berkeley. It is designed for California Indians whose languages have no fluent speakers. The goal will be for the participants to access, understand, and do research on materials on their languages, and to use them for language revitalization. The participants will create language projects based on those materials that they will report on publicly at the end of the week. Each language group will also be assisted by a faculty or graduate student linguistic mentor.

The aims of the Breath of Life workshop are:

• to guide participants to the university resources available for their use;
• to help the participants identify and locate the published and unpublished notes and audio recordings made by linguists and anthropologists on their languages;
• for participants to learn the fundamentals of linguistic analysis, including how to read phonetic writing;
• for participants to learn ways they can use linguistic materials and publications to create materials for language restoration.

We can only take up to 50 participants, hopefully about half returning and half new. To expand the opportunity to a wide range of tribes, we will generally limit the number of people coming from a particular tribe to 4 or 5. If you would like to apply to come to this workshop, please fill out the application form. Applications sent in after May 15 will not be considered.

We hope to see you at Breath of Life!