The Language Revitalization Working Group offers a space to critically examine theories, methodologies, and applications of language revitalization in a variety of world contexts. Additionally, we provide a centralized venue for interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners of language revitalization to share, present, discuss, and improve their language revitalization efforts.
In Spring 2026, we will meet every other Wednesday at 3(:10)pm (PST) in a hybrid format: if you're on campus you can join us in-person in Dwinelle 1303, and if you're not, you can join via Zoom.
For more information, or to be added to our mailing list or bCourses site, please contact Anna Macknick (macknick@berkeley.edu) or Tyler Lee-Wynant (tleewynant@berkeley.edu). If you'd like to attend any of our events but have questions/concerns about accessibility or other accommodations, please reach out via email!
For the 2025-2026 academic year, we are honored and proud to be sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Spring 2026 Meeting Schedule:
TBD; alternating Wednesdays, 3pm PT
Interested in leading a discussion, workshop, or presentation at a LRWGmeeting this spring? Please reach out to Anna Macknick (macknick@berkeley.edu) or Tyler Lee-Wynant (tleewynant@berkeley.edu).
Previous meetings (Fall 2025)
November 5: Jonathan Cirelli
Jonathan Cirelli
Jonathan Cirelli is the Language Program Manager and a member of Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake. In this talk, he will discuss ongoing work in the Language Program and the challenges that having little to no speakers have presented for it, especially for creating their writing system. He will also discuss ongoing work with the CLA.
October 22: Balancing Identities in Language Work During Autumn
Cuitlahuac Arreola Martinez
This talk explores the intersection of Native and Eurocentric identities in language teaching and learning during the autumn months. It focuses on how identity markers such as Brown, Native, Indigequeer, Latine, and Chicane are navigated while maintaining ties to ancestral languages and practices. Set against the backdrop of key cultural events like Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month, Indigenous Peoples Day and Día de Muertos, the talk highlights how seasonal transitions shape language and identity.
October 8: Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization: Welcome and Info Session
Snacks + Inspiration + Connection
You are invited!
On Wednesday October 8, 3:10–4pm in Dwinelle 1303 we will be holding a welcome and information session for the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization.
This will be an opportunity for prospective DE students to ask questions of DE faculty and current DE students and for everyone to talk about their language interests and work, and generally just spend time together.
This year's deadline for applying to the DE is November 2nd. Questions? Email ling-GSAO@berkeley.edu
Looking forward to seeing you at our DE Welcome and Info session event!
September 24: Mini Zine Workshop
Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley)
This hands-on workshop will demonstrate how 8-page mini zines can offer a low-tech, low-resource option for the development of language materials - containing mini grammar lessons, short stories, mini glossaries, or any other content that can be shrunk into eight little pages. We will look at examples using this mini zine format, walk through templates using different levels of tech (Adobe InDesign, Canva, or simply paper and pen), and learn the simple cut-and-fold process.
All supplies will be provided for in-person participants, and you’ll leave the workshop with copies of your own mini zine to share. If you're joining over Zoom, make sure you have paper, scissors, and writing/drawing materials. If you've attended last year's zine workshop, feel free to bring what you made to show to others!
September 10: Fall Welcome
Join us for our first event of the school year where we will be eating snacks, socializing and taking turns sharing about the LR work we're involved with. It'll also be an opportunity to ask for and give advice about projects. No need to prepare anything - come as you are!
Previous meetings (Fall 2024-Spring 2025)
April 30: Language Reawakening: A Panel About Revitalizing (Near-) Sleeping Indigenous Languages
Jonathan Cirelli (Habematolel Pomo), Shaunie Briggs (Salinan), and Chelsi Sparti (Wintu)
Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom
3-4:30 (including a reception with light refreshments)
April 16: Language Endangerment and Reclamation in Jewish Communities Today
Sarah Bunin Benor (Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion)
In a situation of language shift and endangerment, revitalization efforts often focus on language comprehension and production, especially through language classes and intergenerational transmission. This approach may interest select community members but is too much of a commitment for most. A more realistic expectation for widespread communal adoption is fragmentary engagement with a language, including postvernacularity (Shandler 2005), metalinguistic community (Avineri 2012), and ethnolinguistic infusion (Benor 2018). This talk analyzes how contemporary Jewish communities are using these approaches for Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic, and other endangered Jewish languages. These approaches are discussed under the banner of language reclamation (Leonard 2017), a realistic, community-centered response to language shift.
April 2: RESCHEDULED TO NEXT FALL
Carly Tex (AICLS)
March 12: Peer Support & Troubleshooting Workshop
February 26: A Safe Place for Language: Linguistic Accessibility and Vitality among Non-Dominant Languages
Alexia Hatun (UCLA)
What does “language accessibility” mean for minority languages? How can we establish safe places where non-dominant languages can blossom and flourish? This talk presents a vision of how we might overcome situations of linguistic ambiguity by befriending mistakes and embracing uncertainty, opening up a niche where our languages can become accessible, joyful tools to play, communicate, create, and dream.
February 12: Plain Language Workshop for Language Revitalization
Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley)
Linguistics, like any other scholarly discipline, is full of its own technical jargon and complicated concepts. This can present a barrier for communities hoping to access materials about their own languages written by linguists. In this workshop we will practice adapting passages from technical linguistic work into more accessible forms. You are encouraged to bring examples of tricky technical passages from your language or a language you work with for us to workshop together.
January 29: Welcome and Library Launch
Join us for our first event of the semester where we will be eating snacks, socializing and sharing LR projects we'll be working on this semester, and launching the Language Revitalization Library! The library is housed within the Charles J. Fillmore Linguistics Library (1308 Dwinelle), and we have last year's LRWG co-coordinators, Måsi and Tzintia, to thank for its ideation and some of its curation. We will gather in 1303 Dwinelle (and Zoom) as usual and then briefly visit the library in 1308.
November 20: Adapting Wordle for Indigenous Languages
Jacqueline Brixey (Choctaw, USC)
In this workshop, we will adapt code for the popular word-guessing game Wordle to other languages. We'll also learn how to publish our modified code publicly on a website. No prior coding experience necessary! My Choctaw language version, which I've renamed "Anumple", is available to try out: https://anumple.vercel.app/
Jacqueline “Lina” Brixey is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), and has worked as a researcher within the Natural Language Dialogue Group at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies since 2016, focusing on Indigenous and endangered languages, dialogue systems, and bilingualism. As a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Lina is committed to supporting and empowering Native American communities through technology and education and has created the world’s first Choctaw language corpus — a collection of written and spoken texts essential for the study of languages — a bilingual chatbot, and a dialogue system for language documentation.
November 6: The Politics of Script (Re)Vitalization: Case Studies of Lampung and Bété
Anushah Hossain (Script Encoding Initiative)
This informal talk will reflect on recent projects by the Script Encoding Initiative focused on unencoded scripts in Indonesia and Côte d'Ivoire. 'Unencoded scripts' refers to writing systems that are not yet available for interchange on digital devices. For these scripts to be accessible on devices, they must be documented and proposed to the Unicode Consortium, a California-based standards body. The talk will explore the tensions inherent in a technical standards body serving as a de facto arbiter of writing systems, especially for scripts that are either newly invented and seeking to be established (like Bété) or balancing historical authenticity with modern use (such as Lampung).
Anushah Hossain is Research Director of the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley, a project that works on making historic and modern minority scripts available on digital devices. She is also a historian of computing and focuses on the development and impacts of text technologies in society.
October 23: E-Reo: Empowering Language Revitalization with Digital Tools
Vanessa Raffin (E-Reo)
Many Indigenous languages lack educational resources and effective tools for transmission to younger generations. E-Reo provides a code-free platform that empowers speakers of Indigenous languages and linguists to create, publish, and maintain mobile applications for language and cultural preservation. Even with a small or limited set of content (words, phrases, audio), users can easily start building engaging apps. From this single database, they can create multiple different apps, allowing learners to explore and practice languages through interactive content. This solution simplifies technical complexities, considers geographical dispersion, and engages young people through digital means.
Vanessa Raffin, originally from continental France, spent a decade in the United States before moving to Tahiti, French Polynesia, in 2023. She began her career teaching French as a second language, a role she held for over ten years. Later, she transitioned into Speech and Language Pathology, practicing in the field before relocating to the US with her husband, Sebastien Christian. Together, they developed a software platform in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was eventually acquired by a large company.
October 9: Workshop: Creating mini zines for accessible language materials
Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley)
This hands-on workshop will demonstrate how 8-page mini zines can offer a low-tech, low-resource option for the development of language materials - containing mini grammar lessons, short stories, mini glossaries, or any other content that can be shrunk into eight little pages. We will look at examples using this mini zine format, walk through templates using different levels of tech (Adobe InDesign, Canva, or simply paper and pen), and learn the simple cut-and-fold process. All supplies will be provided, and you’ll leave the workshop with copies of your own mini zine to share.
September 25: Writing workshop: Using creative expression in language revitalization
Beth Piatote (Nez Perce, UC Berkeley)
Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books: the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which received honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for the 2014 Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; and the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Prize for Fiction. The Beadworkers has been featured on NPR and selected as the “one read” for multiple university and community programs. Her full-length play, Antikoni, has been supported by workshops and public readings with Native Voices at the Autry, New York Classical Theatre, and the Indigenous Writers Collaborative at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and her short play, Tricksters, Unite! was featured in the 2022 Native Voices Short Play Festival. She currently holds a playwriting fellowship with AlterTheatre. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Epiphany, Poetry, World Literature Today, PMLA, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and other major journals and anthologies. She has served as a judge for literary awards for PEN America and the Poetry Foundation. She is currently working on a scholarly monograph on the representation of Native American legal systems through sensory representations (sound, visuality, synesthesia, and haunting) in texts across the long twentieth century; a collection of poems, and a collection of essays.
Beth’s research interests include Native American and Indigenous literature and history, arts, and law; Nez Perce language and literature, and Indigenous language revitalization more broadly; and creative writing. She co-created and now chairs the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization at Berkeley. Currently she serves as the Director of the Arts Research Center, where she has established the Indigenous Poetics Lab to support artistic expression as a means of language revitalization. She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She is Nez Perce and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
September 11: Presentation of book "Manual de lengua Cucapáh" (Cucapáh language manual), co-authored by Fernando David Márquez Duarte and Cucapáh elder Margarita Valenzuela Portillo
Fernando David Márquez Duarte, Loenia Gutiérrez Moreto Cruz, Alejandro Maclis Valenzuela
Fernando David Márquez Duarte is a Mexican decolonial Marxist activist and thinker from Mexicali, Baja California. He is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California Riverside (UCR). He has published academic articles in English and Spanish and edited the book Decolonizing Politics and Theories from the Abya Yala, as well as the book Awi Uyáj Cucapáh: El saber Cucapáh. He is the co-author of the book Manual de Lengua Cucapáh, along with Cucapáh elder Margarita Valenzuela. He has conducted projectes advising and supporting Indigenous groups in Baja California, México, such as the Cucapáh and Triqui, regarding Indigenous rights, political participation, language preservation, etc. He is proficient in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.
Lorenia Gutiérrez Moreto Cruz is a Mexican linguist from Mexicali, Baja California, with a Bachelor’s degree in Language Teaching. She has participated in transcribing data found in different sources about the Cucapáh language and helping with part of the linguistic analysis. She has also participated in community projects with the Cucapáh Indigenous group about Indigenous rights and language preservation. She is proficient in Spanish and English.
Alejandro Maclis Valenzuela is a Cucapáh Indigenous person, son of Cucapáh elder Margarita Valenzuela Portillo, from Ejido Cucapáh Mestizo, Baja California, México. He is participating in the Cucapáh language preservation project.
Printed copies of the book available for $15 and Cucapáh art pieces for sale