Events

Published in May 2023, the Tunica Language Textbook (Rowintaworu Luhchi Yoroni) is the result of over 10 years of work by the Tunica Language Working Group (Kuhpani Yoyani Luhchi Yoroni), a collaboration between the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana and Tulane University. This talk examines some of the challenges and successes during the creation, editing, and publication of the Tunica Language Textbook.

This presentation explores how the Tunica Language Working Group has responded to the community’s desire to access and engage with historical Tunica language documentation, and the successes and challenges of publicly presenting the language documentation transcribed, parsed, and analyzed in SIL’s Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx).

This talk discusses the structure of the Tunica revitalization effort and the methods that are used to maximize the effectiveness of a five-person Language & Culture Revitalization Program and a small group of linguistics volunteers.

This talk looks at the design of a series of workshops aimed at demystifying the processes behind reawakening the language Tunica and providing community members a variety of ways to participate in the process as innovators and creators, even if they don’t have time to devote to consistent participation.

This presentation discusses some of the methods the Tunica Language Project has used to expand the lexicon and deal with holes in the grammar.

This paper covers the experiences of the Tunica Language Working Group as it worked to have the Tunica’s vitality accurately reflected online.

This paper discusses the ways in which the Tunica Language Working Group has worked to avoid the tropes around endangered languages that Hill (2002) identifies: universal ownership, hyperbolic valorization, and enumeration. These tropes divorce language from the speech community. The Tunica Language Working Group centers community needs and desires in priority-setting and decision-making.

This paper covers the efforts made over the past year and a half to get the status of the Tunica language accurately represented in a variety of online resources by endangered language gatekeepers.

This paper aims to explain English double modal constructions (e.g., “might could”) using a construction grammar framework.

The goal of our research is to better document the French of Grand Isle before it disappears entirely in order to have a more complete understanding of language variation in francophone Louisiana. In this presentation, we report the preliminary results of our fieldwork, focusing on the linguistic features we have found that set it apart from the rest of Louisiana French.

In this presentation, we report on our efforts to determine how many Creole speakers remain in the area, how attitudes towards the language have evolved since Klingler’s 2003 study, and what effect language preservation efforts have had.

We present a film that provides an introduction to the town, featuring interviews with natives, highlighting its cultural and linguistic history. The film focuses in particular on the participants identity and its tie to linguistic features, noting in particular Italian retentions still heard in the town today.