The three tropes Hill (2002) identifies divorce language from the speech community that either uses or identifies with it, and they presuppose a need for the writer to justify the language’s value and its continued existence. These tropes continue to be widely used in introductory material when speaking about minority languages.
Closer collaboration with community members in both research and publication can help combat tendencies to present the language as an entity separate from those whose who speak it or identify with it. The Tunica Language Working Group (Kuhpani Yoyani Luhchi Yoroni) is a close collaboration between a group of linguists at Tulane University and the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana’s Language and Culture Revitalization Program, including one Tulane graduate student working for the tribal community full time. Through twice-weekly meetings, frequent communication, and collaborative events and projects, the group is able to better mediate a shared notion of why the language, the projects, and the research are important.
Differences in priorities and ideas are still routine, but the close collaboration means that there is more opportunity to address them with community stakeholders as the research is being done rather than dealing with them after the research is published. In keeping with the collaborative nature of the project, and of this panel, this paper has been coauthored with Elisabeth Pierite-Mora, a Tunica language instructor with the Tunica-Biloxi Language and Culture Revitalization Program.