The symposium was quite a success, I thought. It was the first I attended, and nice to see what's going on and what others are researching. Subject matter of the talks ranged, touching on graphic design, the successes and failures behind the development of writing systems, the varying web-presence between Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi; and the syntax and semantics of reflexive pronouns, tone and intonation, and issues involving machine translation and lexical databases.

One of the things that I felt was an important theme was that when doing academic research, it is important to return something back to the communities you are working with. Otherwise, if you're working with endangered languages, how can you help them improve their situation? Some research produces results that is usable by these communities, and some research does not. Of course, it always means extra work to do so, but isn't it good to have an effect on things?

Anyway, brief update, but, here are some projects and resources to check out for those interested. I'll add some more things from time to time, as they come up.

• 2nd Annual Sámi Linguistics Symposium, which is a part of the Saami Documentation and Revitalization Network who, along with the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel is putting on the Winter School in Saami Language Documentation and Revitalization
• Sámi proofing tools, currently available for Northern Sámi and Lule Sámi. The tools are produced by Sámi language technology group (also known as Giellatekno Northern Sámi for 'language-tech'), which has a few projects highly worth checking out, such as dictionaries, lexical resources, word parsers.
• CASTL - Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics - A department working on a number of projects, a lot of which involve Sámi language stuff.

Posted by:

Ryan