2009 Trudeau Scholar

christopher.cox@trudeaufoundation.net

Profile

In recent years, responses to language endangerment have assumed both increasing prominence and urgency, given estimates of unprecedented rates of global language extinction throughout the present century and growing recognition of the ultimate cost of language loss.  As both the cradle and the capstone of culture, the cumulative product of generations of conventional and creative thought, language stands among the crowning achievements of society, at once uniquely human and inherently fragile in its transmission across generations – and its loss thus an immeasurable diminishment of our collective human diversity.

This threat to linguistic diversity informs Christopher's doctoral research at the University of Alberta, where he seeks to apply his backgrounds in computational science and linguistics to the task of language documentation through community-partnered corpus construction.  The creation of corpora as permanent, digital records of disappearing linguistic practices aims to provide common ground for collaboration between academic and speaker communities; to promote such permanent records for use in both community language programs and linguistic research; and to serve as a tacit act of language activism, affirming the fundamental worth of the language being documented, and thus presenting an opportunity for communities to reclaim respect for their linguistic heritage.

Christopher is currently engaged in such corpus construction for Plautdietsch, the traditional language of the Russian Mennonites.  His experiences as a student of Plautdietsch in the Mennonite communities of central Saskatchewan for the past twelve years have encouraged him in his work with archives, researchers, and Plautdietsch-speaking communities on three continents; in maintaining Plautdietsch-L, the first discussion forum on the Internet dedicated to Plautdietsch, since its founding in 1998; in adapting and developing computational tools to assist in collaborative corpus development; and, most recently, in participating in the documentation of Tsuut'ina, a highly endangered Athapaskan language of southern Alberta.