Tibusungu Vayayana, Associate Professor and Director of the Indigenous Research & Development center at NTNU, and Linguistics Chair Richard Wright recently participated in the workshop entitled "Language Shift in the Sinophone World", organized by Steve Harrell of Antropology and Talant Mawkanuli of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization. The workshop, held this November 6th at the Simpson Center for the Humanities on the UW campus, drew participants from around the world . The keynote address of the one-day event featured Lindsay Whaley of Dartmouth College, who presented "Language Loss: Lessons from Northern China".
Profs. Wright's and Vayayana's talk, "The Status of the Tsou Language of Taiwan", focused on attempts to revitalize the endangered indigenous language of Taiwan.
Other participants in the workshop: Linguistics Associate Professor Edith Aldridge spoke on "The Status of Austronesian Languages in Taiwan" and PhD candidate Sarala Puthuval gave a talk entitled "Language, identitly and the moral high ground in Inner Mongolia: practical problems for language shift research".