Connection, collaboration and community : reflections on the use of videoconferencing in Kaska language documentation, revitalization and education ...

• Main Author: Sear, Victoria Frances
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2018
• Subjects: Watson Lake; Yukon
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0371250; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0371250

This thesis addresses how stakeholders of Kaska, a Dene Athabaskan language spoken in northeastern British Columbia and the southeastern Yukon, have incorporated videoconferencing technology into their long-distance language documentation, revitalization and education practices. Many speakers and communities of endangered, Indigenous, and minority languages who live in remote regions are at a disadvantage simply because of their remoteness, which has limited their ability to access funding, form partnerships and work with language researchers. In turn, historically such Indigenous languages — their speakers, their stakeholders and their projects — have been under-resourced. This thesis discusses how a team of Kaska language workers have used a professional videoconferencing platform to regularly engage in long-distance collaborative language projects between Watson Lake, Yukon, and Vancouver, British Columbia. While language projects often focus either on documentation or revitalization of a language, in ...