The need for more and better linguistic fieldwork has become increasingly clear over the last two decades, as has the urgency of that work in the face of widespread language endangerment. While funds are increasingly available for fieldwork and language documentation, and communities are increasingly motivated to take steps to document and revitalize their ancestral languages, the pool of trained field linguists is nowhere near large enough to meet the need.  Further, the nature of field work is undergoing a rapid shift due to new technologies and increased awareness of the fieldworker’s responsibilities to the speech communities, such that those who received their field training even 10-15 years ago could benefit from exposure to new tools and methods. The linguistics departments of the United States have not yet responded vigorously to produce a large new generation of field linguists who can meet these needs and there are few venues where established linguists and language activists (members of speech communities who take an active role in promoting the use of their ancestral languages) can learn about the modern options available to them.  

 

Following the successful model of InField 2008 (Santa Barbara), InField 2010 (University of Oregon) responds to all these needs by bringing together a world-class faculty to lead a two-week series of workshops in modern fieldwork methodologies, followed by either a week of supervised laboratory practice or a four-week intensive field methods class to give inexperienced participants the opportunity to put these methods into practice.  To better serve the needs of language activists, InField 2010 will be integrated with the summer session of the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI), and in addition, the weekend before InField the University of Oregon (UO) will host the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium (SILS) and a series of linguistics conferences specific to the families of languages spoken in Oregon.