The 2021 International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation: Identifying and Fostering Relationships to Overcome Critical Challenges

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This project will bring together leading scholars from across the world to explore how developing new strategic partnerships (and fostering ongoing ones) can help overcome critical challenges in documentary linguistics and language revitalization research as part of the 2021 International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC). With more than half of the world's 7000 languages currently at risk of disappearing--at least 170 of them in the United States alone--there is an urgent need both to create an enduring documentary record of endangered languages and to support teaching and learning of those languages. Given the magnitude of this endangered language crisis, linguists and language communities must seek out strategic partnerships to overcome the most critical challenges, including among others the enormous task of producing (at least some) documentation for the vast number of endangered signed and spoken languages that have little to no documentation, the massive gap between the amount of audiovisual documentation collected, and the amount of transcriptions of these data that are available (i.e., the so-called "transcription bottleneck"). Despite these large-scale challenges, there are still relatively few partnerships that aim to address them. Thus, this project will open a dialogue between linguists, language community members, and scholars from other disciplines to forge robust and reliable solutions for addressing critical challenges in language documentation and conservation. NSF support will enable a series of targeted workshops and roundtable discussions devoted to bringing stakeholders together around various aspects of initiating and fostering strategic partnerships. The conference will also feature a special interactive plenary event with the express purpose of bringing together participants to create a dialogue about how a renewed focus on identifying and fostering strategic partnerships can be leveraged to meet critical challenges.Since its inception in 2009, ICLDC has become the flagship venue driving scholarship in the documentation, maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Participants include undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty from linguistics, anthropology, biology, computer science, and other academic disciplines. ICLDC has also included a large number of citizen scientists from historically underrepresented groups in the sciences, such as Native Americans, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, offering opportunities for broadening participation in the language sciences as one of the broader impacts of this conference. ICLDC offers its highly-diverse audience opportunities for informal science education and training that includes new methodologies and best practices in cutting-edge language documentation and that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. In addition, this conference serves as one of the foremost venues for the dissemination of research findings in language documentation and conservation and related disciplines.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.