Everyone benefits from linguistic diversity within their local area. It provides the core differences in perspective that is the basis for creativity, and the core strength of collective problem-solving. Unfortunately, much of modern life is monolingual English to an extent that linguistic diversity is eroded by the brutal pace of contemporary existence.
The work of language arts and linguistic diversity often falls on language keepers. These are the Individuals who have decided to commit their minds and energy to the preservation, growth, and maintenance health of their languages. Becoming a keeper of Indigenous and minoritized language requires immense amounts of time, passion, and sacrifice. At the same time, this work is often under-compensated and overlooked.
Language keepers would benefit if there was a better understanding of their work. A greater empathy and curiosity from people not involved in language work can help communities design effective policies to maintain and grow multilingualism in their area.
The Language Keeper project aims to uplift the voices of community-based language practitioners, and provide a public portal into the personal world of language work.
This ongoing project is creating a series of public access documentation of language keepers. Interviewer Hali Dardar uses semi-structured conversational interviews to better understand each individual's motivations, challenges, and successes.
Each interview provides perspective on the work of language keepers, and how their community has found ways to celebrate and grow. As group, the collection shares the struggles and celebrations of linguistic activists working in a variety of language contexts.
The series hopes to establish a collective understanding of the pressures faced by minoritized language communities.
Interviews are the chosen project format because they require little to no preparation to get complex and detailed information from very busy people. All interviews will follow the Language Keeper Interview Script, but can drift with the conversation. There is no length constraint, and interviews last as long as they need.
Each interview produces audio, video, and a transcript. All three of these can be remixed and re-used. After each interview is complete, this project works with the interviewee to revise or edit as needed. Once the interview is complete, and the language keeper approves the edits, the interviews will be publicly available on YouTube and added to the website.
This project uses the Uke' Contracting System, an interaction design and legal process created to address Indigenous data sovereignty. This system is built to challenge why the digitization of oral knowledge results in shared legal copyright ownership with the interviewer.
The Uke' System creates sole ownership at the initial fixation of copyright for sound, video, and image recordings. You can view a demo of the interaction here: https://youtu.be/Kg4IApscOac.
The system requires language keeper to complete a Work for Hire contract which ensures they maintain full copyright ownership of the interview. The interviewer then requests a Limited Use License, which provides temporary rights for the interviewer to use the work within the Language Keeper project. As this project expands, we want to consider how language keepers can gain residual profit from their inter-generational investment in lived experiences.
We acknowledge that this is a massive ripple in the current procedures of institutional research and organizational data management. It represents a paradigm shift where knowledge holders would keep all intellectual property rights within oral history research interviews. The system is a proposition the field to to reconsider legal protocol for oral history interviews and digitized traditional knowledge.
Hali Dardar is an interaction designer, project manager, and creative storymaker. She enjoys developing long-term, creative engagements to improve organizational process and produce community affirming change. Current work includes elements of language revitalization, online communities, volunteer leadership, mentoring, event production, art, community memory, collaborative storytelling, site-specific experiences, intercultural communications, cultural media, and digital ceremony. From Louisiana, she is a tribal member of the United Houma Nation and co-founder of the Houma Language Project. She wrote about the cultural memory of coastal fur trappers during her BA in Mass Communication (Print Journalism) from Louisiana State University. In her MA in Arts, Culture, and Media (Arts Criticism and Analysis) from the University of Groningen she explicated the components of digital documentaries to approach these as design guides for digital organized cultural participation.