The Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) is an international institute which creates multi-dimensional networks and provides quality training for language workers, including activists, teachers, linguists, and students from all types of communities. CoLang workshops provide hands-on skills in language reclamation, documentation, and related fields as practiced in collaborative, community-based contexts. CoLang 2024 will be co-hosted by Arizona State University and the O’odham-Piipaash Language Program of the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community in Phoenix, AZ from June 3-28, 2024. 

Co-Directors: Tyler Peterson (ASU) & Luis Barragan (SRPMIC)

Indigenous Languages of the Americas and their Structures (ILAS) is a project dedicated to supporting community-centered language revitalization, reclamation and maintenance. The primary goal of the ILAS project is to produce a series open-access textbooks for language workers, with a focus on Indigenous languages of the Americas. The aim of these books is to enable community language workers to use linguistic concepts and tools in their work, and to make previously published work on Indigenous languages more accessible.

Project Advisor: Diana Archangeli (UA)

This is a joint CNRS-UA project focused on village and emerging sign languages in Mesoamerica. There are a large number of small sign languages throughout Mayan-speaking region of Mesoamerica due to high rates of congenital deafness in various Maya communities (Le Guen 2019). Fox Tree 2009 documents how some of these sign languages, for example Meemul Tzij, used in the K'iche' Maya speaking area, incorporates pan-Maya gestures of arguably ancient origin (due to the fact that they are seen in Classic Maya inscriptions). The goal of this project is to document the pluractional systems of both Mayan sign languages, as well as co-speech gesture with pluractionals in spoken Mayan languages.

Co-PIs: Robert Henderson (UA), Jeremy Kuhn & Carlo Geraci (CNRS)

The goal of this project is to create an accessible, searchable  video dictionary of North American Indian Sign Language (NAISL), developed from various NAISL varieties from across the continent. This project is a community-driven effort to preserve this rich cultural and linguistic resource for future generations and to give signers the tools to study their own unique sign languages and bring them back into use.

PI: Melanie McKay-Cody (UA)

The Arizona Algonquian Linguistics Group (affectionately known as ARUGULA (backronymed to A Reading Union for the Good Understanding of the Linguistics of Algonquian)) is a research and reading group of graduate students and faculty working on Algonquian languages and linguistics. The primary foci of this group are comparative grammar and language revitalization. 

Director: Heidi Harley (UA)

The Celtic Linguistics Group is a research cluster of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates that studies the syntax, morphology, phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, documentation and revitalization of the modern Celtic languages, with an emphasis on Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, Manx and Irish Gaelic.

Director: Andrew Carnie (UA)