Chapter 2. The Language Documentation and Conservation Initiative at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Abstract

Since its inception in 1963, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) has had a special focus on Austronesian and Asian languages. It has supported and encouraged fieldwork on these languages, and it has played a major role in the development of vernacular language education programs in Micronesia and elsewhere. In 2003, the department renewed and intensified its commitment to such work through what I shall refer to in this chapter as the Language Documentation and Conservation Initiative (LDCI). The LDCI has three major objectives. The first is to provide high- quality training to graduate students who wish to undertake the essential task of documenting the many underdocumented and endangered languages of Asia and the Pacific. The second is to promote collaborative research efforts among linguists, native speakers of endangered and underdocumented languages, and other interested parties. The third is to facilitate the free and open exchange of ideas among all those working in this field. In this chapter, I discuss each of these three objectives and the activities being conducted at UHM in support of them.