IDIL Veranstaltung ISW Uni Bern

The Institute of Linguistics at the University of Bern has been carrying out language documentation projects of indigenous languages for several decades. During the last 10 years or so, a special focus has been on indigenous languages of the Himalayas, although other indigenous languages around the world have been documented as well. Documentation has primarily consisted of linguistic descriptive grammars, and more recently also substantial corpora of audio/video documentation.
In order to reach out to the general public and share our research on the great diversity of human languages, we are organizing this event. There will be four presentations on four different indigenous languages that researchers of our institute have been working on in collaboration with the respective communities: Mixteco, Totonac, Mewahang (Kiranti), and Vamale. After one hour of presentations, we will have a half hour panel discussions and then will host a reception in order to provide further opportunity for the general public to hear about our research and ask questions.
We aim to let the generic public understand the threats that indigenous languages are facing, why it is important to document languages, why linguistic diversity is important, and what we are doing to help safeguard it.