Conference presentation:
The theme for the 7th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation, held March 4-7, 2021, was “Recognizing Relationships.” I presented at this conference, sharing findings from interviews conducted in Summer 2020 about the centrality of relationships for understanding motivation in language revitalization contexts. The ICLDC organizers and presenters made their presentations publicly available on YouTube; you can see my presentation in the video embedded below, and you can click through to the ICLDC YouTube page to see more of the presentations that year.
Mixed methods findings about relationship types from Global Survey of Language Revitalization Efforts:
This table shows the frequency of relationship types mentioned in text responses to the Global Survey of Language Revitalization Efforts. These were coded thematically and checked by inter-rater reliability (see Research design and Methods for more information on the Survey and the method.) The percentages given are out of 142 responses coded as part of this project.
| Frequency in the survey (number of surveys which mention this theme) | Example excerpt | Cohen’s Kappa scores (inter-rater reliability) | |
| Family | 33 (23.24%) | To support families in their revitalization efforts [ID 86, Keres-Cochiti Dialect] | 0.71 |
| Focus on elders, ancestors | 25 (17.61%) | Elders called for help, and heritage organizations were formed as a result. [ID 128, Tlingit] | 0.9 |
| Focus on youth, children | 64 (45.07%) | Getting all children to be bilingual again [ID 121, Western Apache] | 0.84 |
| Generations | 27 (19.01%) | To document and preserve the language for future genarations [ID 34, Tjwao] | 0.95 |
| Key individuals | 55 (38.73%) | These efforts are being continued by one of the original students, now working as a teacher. [ID 111, Kaáⁿze Íe] | 0.69 |
| Outside connections | 36 (25.1%) | To network with other organisations of similar objectives in Zimbabwe and the world over. [ID 239, TjiKalanga] | 0.67 |
Coding schema for interview data:
Here is a visual representation of the excerpt codes and subthemes that make up the Relationships theme in analysis of interviews with language revitalization practitioners:
Relationships theme – coding schema
References for conference presentations on this topic: