30th Annual Phi Beta Kappa Fall Lecture
Dr. Douglas Wharram
Ukâlagasuanik: Linguistic Diversity and Why it Matters
5:30 p.m. | Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022 | Lecture Hall, Doudna Fine Arts Center
Co-sponsored by the Redden Foundation, Mary Coon Cottingham Fund, EIU Department of English, EIU Center for the Humanities, EIU Department of World Languages and Cultures, and the PBK Alumni Association of East Central Illinois.
We live in an age of mass language extinction. Currently, on average, a language disappears approximately every 13 days, and the rate of language extinction is accelerating. Some twenty years ago, on average, the rate of language disappearance was approximately one every 14 days. By all reasonable accounts, between 50% and 90% of the languages currently spoken will become extinct by the end of THIS century. Dr. Wharram considers some of the implications of this, and describes his experiences working with Labrador Inuit around issues of language maintenance and revitalization.
Dr. Douglas Wharram (Ph.D. University of Connecticut) is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Trained as a formal semanticist and syntactician, Dr. Wharram remains an active researcher in those fields, but is primarily being invited on the basis of his collaborative work on the documentation and revitalisation of Rigolet Inuktut and Labrador Inuttut, dialects of Inuktitut, and of his co-teaching, alongside native speakers of the language, of Labrador Inuttut courses in Newfoundland and various communities in Labrador. Winner of multiple major research grants in Canada, he has published widely on languages of north-eastern Canada.
