Preface
In 2015 while I was working on my M.A., I competed in a 3-minute thesis competition at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Each student had 3 minutes to present their research in a way that was accessible to a general audience. This was my first foray into science communication in linguistics! I not only won the UCSB competition, but went on to place 2nd at the system-wide University of California competition. The success of that talk was a glimpse of things to come I guess!
The media attention from that talk also gave me the opportunity to write an article for The Conversation, which was picked up by media outlets all over the country, including Time.
So here's the video from that talk in 2015, and the full text of the article. I'm still very proud of it all things considered. 🥹
Introduction
In the summer of 1930, at the dawn of the Great Depression, a 21-year-old linguist named Morris Swadesh set out for Louisiana to record the area’s Native American languages, which were disappearing rapidly.
Morris and his peers were in a race against time to document them, and in the small town of Charenton on the Bayou Teche, he encountered Benjamin Paul and Delphine Ducloux, members of a small tribe called Chitimacha – and the last two speakers of their language.
But today, if you visited the Chitimacha reservation, you’d never know that their language went unspoken for half a century.
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