The COLING organized a number of workshops and summer schools (
https://coling.al.uw.edu.pl/news(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) which provided researchers with opportunities to present the results of their work, receive feedback from colleagues, but also to do extensive research in libraries, archives and educational institutions in the USA, Mexico, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands and Poland.
The secondments allowed to run pilot projects on documentation of the endangered languages, community-based archives, and organizing language courses. Extensive sociolinguistic and historical research on the role of scripts, orthographies, and typefonts in the shaping of identities, ideologies, and language attitudes was carried out. This can also be a point of departure to investigate the local application of minority policy rules, the attitude to minority(ies) in local social environment and problems connected with codification of oral languages and cultures.
The research included studies of heritage language communities and their language preservation scenarios after migration, ancient pictorial manuscripts of Native American cultures, developing teaching materials and resources for small languages, building online resources, developing community-based pedagogies.
Activities focused also on developing skills to encourage and empower community members, for example by training teachers and students in the use of audio and video equipment, protocols for the transcription and translation of recordings, digital tools, social media and best practices.
New teaching materials were developed for a number of languages involved in the project, including textbooks, educational games, online resources, flashcards, which may serve as templates for the development of materials in other languages after they have been extensively tested in workshops organized as part of the project’s events.
Great emphasis is placed on the cooperation with local communities to help them in their efforts to revitalize and document their heritage languages and promote local scholarship and development.
Other areas covered included discrimination of non-native speakers in the dominant society, indigenous culture and performance art, stereotypes in art, language ideologies and attitudes, orthographies, the role of museology in the maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages and cultures, indigenous epistemologies, legal protection of the intellectual property of indigenous peoples.
The research program strives to understand the dynamics of intergenerational knowledge transfer and recognizes that language communities and scholars have a mutual interest in documenting, revitalizing and sustaining languages and the knowledge embedded in them.
