Aleut language revitalization

(Culture Camp 2019 on Atka Island, Alaska)

Aleut is a critically endangered (<100 speakers) language originating from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. Today, Aleuts live in diaspora, and no L1 speakers of Aleut have been produced for at least two generations. I have been working with the Aleut community on a language revitalization project based off of the Where Are Your Keys method since 2018, and am committed to doing so for the foreseeable future, as it is my own heritage language.

Language revitalization in the Aleut community has involved teaching, learning, monolingual elicitation from speakers, developing curricula, and general community-building activities. See here for my undergraduate honors thesis on constructing pedagogical materials in a revitalization-specific environment, which won a Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts. The resulting resource, The Aleut Picture Dictionary, can be found here.

If you are interested in Aleut or language revitalization at large, please reach out!