The 2nd Conference on Language Contact in the Circumpolar World has just been announced. It will have a special session on typology of linguistic areas and will be held from October 25–27, 2019 at the Institute of Linguistics RAS, Moscow, Russia.
Call for proposals June 15–26, 2020, CoLang Workshops
We are seeking workshop proposals for topics related to language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization for the seventh Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) in 2020. CoLang 2020 will be held on the campus of the University of Montana, co-hosted by the University of Montana and Chief Dull Knife College, a tribal college in Lame Deer, Montana. The two weeks of workshops will be followed by three weeks of intensive language documentation practica.
Job: Specialists, University of California, San Diego
The Office of Research Affairs, at the University of California, San Diego, in support of the campus, multidisciplinary Organized Research Units (ORUs) is conducting an open search for various Specialists (non-tenured, Assistant, Associate or Full level) in various academic disciplines. At UC San Diego, Specialists are academic appointees who provide expertise in a specialized area, engage in professional activities, and University and/or public service, do not have formal teaching responsibilities, and normally work as a member of a research team lead by a Principal Investigator.
The International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019: Perspectives Conference Call for presentations
Reminder: Call for Organized Session Proposals, SSILA 2020 Winter Meeting, New Orleans
The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) will hold its annual winter meeting jointly with the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in New Orleans, LA on January 2–5, 2020. SSILA meetings allow scholars to present on a wide range of topics centered on any aspect of Indigenous American languages.
Call for Reviewers: SSILA Summer 2019 Meeting
SSILA 2020 Winter Meeting: Call for Organized Session Proposals
Deadline: May 1 @ 11:59 p.m. Hawaii-Aleutian time
The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) will hold its annual winter meeting jointly with the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside in New Orleans, LA on January 2–5, 2020. SSILA meetings allow scholars to present on a wide range of topics centered on any aspect of Indigenous American languages.
CFP: SSILA Summer 2019 Meeting
The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) will hold a summer meeting at the LSA 2019 Linguistic Institute, which will take place at the University of California, Davis. The meeting will be held on July 13 and July 14 at the UC Davis Conference Center. SSILA meetings allow scholars to present on a wide range of topics centered on any aspect of Indigenous American languages.
2019 Best Student Presentation Award
LSA offers fee waiver to Indigenous scholars for 2019–2020 meetings
The LSA is pleased to announce that members of Indigenous communities, including linguists and language activists, will be granted a fee waiver for its 2019 and 2020 Annual Meetings, in recognition of the International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019, as declared by UNESCO. Those who qualify for the waiver will meet UNESCO’s definition of an Indigenous person.*
CFP: Community-based language research across the Americas
CBLRAA 2019 is a workshop organized in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA). The goal of the workshop is to promote and proliferate strategies for documenting and revitalizing American indigenous languages by finding ways to improve communication among community members, researchers, and institutions who engage in community-based language work. At the workshop we will discuss differences and similarities among the community-based approaches being applied, ethical and practical issues that arise, what we can learn from one another, and how we can maintain channels of communication and collaboration in the future.
The nomination deadline for SSILA's Archiving Award has been extended to October 15
Nominations for SSILA's Archiving Award are due October 15! This award highlights the importance of creating long-term archival materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such work as more comparable to analytic research.
Read more about the Archiving Award and the nomination guidelines here.
SSILA Newsletter & Bulletin Archives
SSILA is thrilled to announce the launch of the SSILA Newsletter and Bulletin archives on the SSILA website! SSILA issued its quarterly newsletter from 1981–2012, and the electronic bulletin from 1993–2012. Both were edited primarily by Victor Golla. The archives contain copies of nearly every one of the newsletters and bulletins, serving as a rich and valuable insight into SSILA's history. We hope you enjoy perusing the archive!
Note: The Newsletter and Bulletin archives are available to SSILA members only. If you are already a member, simply log into the website here. If you would like to purchase a SSILA membership, you can do so on the memberships page.
Beginning with the founding of the organization in 1981, SSILA issued a quarterly newsletter under the Editorship of Victor Golla (initially Ken Whistler, and later also Karen Sue Rolph), first in physical form, and later in digital format. In its first year in particular, the newsletter was intended to "serve as an important forum for discussion of the goals of the Society". It then evolved into a forum for announcements of interest to members, and discussion of issues in the field.
In 1993, with the advent of the internet, email, and listservs, the Society also began issuing an electronic bulletin, which was sent to all SSILA members at approximately monthly intervals, and edited by Victor Golla. It carried announcements of upcoming meetings, job announcements, and other late-breaking news.
The Society launched a new website with the ability to make blog posts in 2012, around which time both the newsletter and bulletin were discontinued. However, these communiques provide a valuable insight into SSILA's history, and contain much useful information. As such, in 2017 the SSILA Executive Committee undertook an initiative to create an archive of the newsletters and bulletins. Carolyn MacKay (former Executive Secretary) headed the effort, while Randa Marhenke and Willem de Reuse were instrumental in providing copies of the majority of the bulletins from their archives. Frank Treschel and Marianne Mithun also provided numerous issues of the newsletters. The documents were then organized into an online digital archive by Daniel W. Hieber (the SSILA Webmaster).
The archives are accessible to SSILA members only, so you will need to log into the SSILA.org website in order to view them. If you would like to sign up for a SSILA membership, you can do so here.
SSILA Archiving Award
The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) is very pleased to announce a new award, the SSILA Archiving Award.
This award highlights the importance of creating long-term archival materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such work as more comparable to analytic research.
The award is presented to one or more researchers (from any community) who have created an accessible documentary collection of materials relating to an indigenous language of the Americas. Taking each collection's context and ethical protocols into account, each collection so honored will be assessed on the following characteristics:
- It should be linguistically and/or ethnographically rich.
- It should be diverse in content, including some annotated or transcribed material.
- It should be housed in a long-term preservation archive.
- Its content should be accessible to heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities.
- It should be well described through collection-level metadata, item-level metadata, and a finding aid or descriptive overview which includes how the language community's priorities have been met.
- Its content should be potentially impactful for language learners, language maintenance, language teaching, and scholarly research.
This award may be shared by multiple creators of a single collection (including, for example, academic and non-academic researchers, primary language consultants, and collection curators).
Nominations may be made by anyone and should include:
- a letter of nomination identifying the nominee(s) (with curriculum vitae as appropriate), describing the background of their work on the language in question, and the archival collection (with links to online content and metadata, and a finding aid or descriptive overview), and explaining its significance
- one supporting letter also explaining the significance of the archival collection
Self-nominations are permitted.
If you have questions about the award, please direct them to Andrew Garrett (garrett@berkeley.edu), Chair of the Archiving Award Committee. Nominations should be submitted to Andrew Garrett (garrett@berkeley.edu) by September 15.
New Executive Secretary / Treasurer
SSILA is happy to announce that Mary S. Linn (Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage) will be SSILA’s new Executive Secretary / Treasurer!
She will be coordinating with Keren Rice, Tania Granadillo and the Executive Committee. Her three-year term will begin at the end of the SSILA 2019 meeting in New York City.
We would like to thank Mary for her participation in SSILA and for her willingness to take on this important position.