2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL). World-wide, many initiatives use this occasion to raise awareness for indigenous langauges, their importance, the threats that they are facing, and their chances.In the summer term 2019, the course Introduction to Linguistics 2 for students in the BA English Studies and the BA Empirical Linguistics/English Linguistics are working on an Indigenous Language Project. In their project, each student choses an indigenous language and provides a short characterization of its history and status. They also choose a phonological or morphological phenomenon that they describe briefly and, finally, a syntactic phenomenon. In the linguistic description of these phenomena, they try to apply to their chosen language what they have learned during the course meetings.

The chosen languages are mainly indigenous languages spoken in countries that are officially English-speaking, i.e. they come from the British Isles, North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

The course is further enriched by two guest lectures:

• June 5: Dianne Jonas (Frankfurt a.M.): Syntactic fieldwork. 10-12, SH 5.106
• June 12: Mily Crevels (Leiden): South American indigenous languages: The importance of language documentation, 10-12, SH 5.106

Links

• Homepage of the International Year of Indigenous Languages: https://en.iyil2019.org/
• World Atlas of Language Structures Online: https://wals.info/