“People are carrying around translated movies on their mobile devices and sharing videos on Youtube. So, the question for us is, since younger people are so technology savvy, how do we provide resources for them?”

CILLDI is an intensive, summer school held at the U of A every July. Its goal is to train First Nations speakers and educators in endangered language documentation, language revitalization, second-language teaching, curriculum development and language-related research. This year, the program is offering a course in using technology for these goals, said Sally Rice, CILLDI interim director and professor in the Department of Linguistics.

“The thing about video and why it’s so enticing for everybody is it captures that whole context of language use,” she said.

“Language isn’t a word list. It’s not colours and numbers and months of the year and body parts,” said Rice. “It’s real conversation, communication and cultural use. Language is a medium for bringing people together and for cognition, for knowing who you are as a person and how you relate to the world.”

Documenting that use of language is where Cash Cash’s work shines, she said.

“In film you see language in all of its glory and all of the things that linguists didn’t traditionally call ‘language,’ like where you’re looking, what you’re doing with your hands, what your body posture is, the rate at which you’re speaking, the things you’re not saying,” she said. “A new generation of linguists are saying, ‘This is language.’ It’s demeanour, it’s gaze, it’s gesture, it’s register.”

Cash Cash says he hopes to encourage people to look at more cultural dimension of native languages.

“What I’m finding is that there are pairings of gesture and language that become combined unique expressions, and without the gesture there is no corresponding use of the words,” he said. “Gestures have an added-meaning component that is compelling and exciting to see when people do use them.”

Such a broad look at language helps in a program that encompasses a large number of language backgrounds, says Rice.

“I think we have at least 14 different languages present in CILLDI this year, but when you look at the sociolinguistic context of a community, the difference among the languages isn’t that big of a deal,” she said. “What we’re trying to do with our Community Linguist Certificate program is not just to train community linguists in their own language, but to give them enough exposure to how human language works so they can also be of value to their neighbouring communities.”