This workshop results from a grassroots effort to begin a national survey of U.S. Indigenous languages which is guided by the following principles:

• It is entirely Indigenous-driven and has been designed by Indigenous people and for Indigenous people.
• It seeks to create a replicable model and a solid infrastructure that can be shared with other Indigenous communities.
• It will train trainers in current assessment tools, team building, and community-based survey strategies – the first steps in creating a culturally-appropriate model of language vitality assessment within a state-wide network of community-based researchers.

In 2014, the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) responded to the concerns that there really was not a national assessment of Indigenous languages. Funding agencies required community-based surveys, but the only near statistics available were those describing extreme language loss. The most well known were those offered by Michael Krauss as part of securing the Native American Languages Act of 1992. AILDI recognized that, today, the landscape of Indigenous languages includes a large cadre of second language speakers in many communities, who bring their own perceptions and expectations of the role of Indigenous languages in their lives. The first step was to design an assessment infrastructure which could be used to document Native American language vitality for communities to use. With help from the National Science Foundation, AILDI began a ‘language vitality’ project. Realizing that a crucial part of this would require training in formal assessment strategies shaped to serve Indigenous communities, AILDI developed a training model.

This workshop brings one of the early planners of this project, Dr. Tyler Peterson (Arizona State University), and a team of community members who have been engaged in testing the model and survey strategies for the past four years. The other facilitators include Marilyn Reed (Navajo) and Cordella Moses (San Carlos Apache). The aim of this workshop is to provide training in techniques for developing assessments and conducting community-based surveys.  The facilitators will share methods used and the results of their work with workshop  participants while providing training in how to address the important issue of assessing community language vitality.

Facilitation Team

Tyler Peterson, Cordella Moses, and Marilyn Reed