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Martha Tsutsui Billins (host): Hello, and welcome to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. I’m Martha Tsutsui Billins, and today’s episode is with Professor Nicholas Welch. Nicholas Welch is the Canada Research Chair in Change, Adaptation and Revitalization of Aboriginal Languages and an Assistant Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He received his B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Victoria. His Ph.D. is from the University of Calgary and his dissertation was entitled: “The bearable lightness of being: The encoding of coincidence in two-copula languages”. He has done extensive research on Dene and Algonquian morphosyntax, and has also done language revitalization work with languages of Labrador. In addition to teaching and research, Nicholas also runs the YouTube channel, Labrador Languages Preservation Laboratory, or LLPL.
In this interview, Nicholas and I talk about not only his fieldwork and his own research, but also his experience teaching Field Methods, and particularly how that changed during the pandemic, and how, while teaching during the pandemic was very challenging in some ways, there were also some pros or positives, including things like how all of the students in the class could hear the consultant equally well, which isn’t the case in a classroom setting. I also really enjoyed hearing about Nicholas’ work with revitalization projects. And if you want to learn more about Nicholas’ work, you can check out his website, which will be linked in the show notes, or his YouTube channel, which I mentioned in his bio, but one more time, it’s Labrador Languages Preservation Laboratory.
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MTB: All right. Hi. How are you?
Nicholas Welch: Hi. Very well, thanks. Nice to meet you.
MTB: Yeah, nice to meet you, Nicholas. I’m so glad to have you here on Field Notes. To start, can you share with our listeners, how did you first become interested in linguistics, and yeah, how did you become a linguist?
Nicholas Welch: Oh, that’s a very long story. I actually, as an undergrad, was majoring in astronomy and astrophysics. I’d been interested in science since I was a little kid, and then I took a linguistics course as one of my very few electives. The program I was in required about 95% of the credits to be in physics, math, and chemistry. So one of my few electives, I took a linguistics course and was just blown away from the first few days of the class at how incredibly multidisciplinary it is. There was acoustic phonetics in there, which includes some physics. There was anthropology. There was psychology. There was mathematics. It just seemed to go on and on. And that’s an aspect of it that I’ve loved ever since, possibly because I have a very short attention span, but in any case, that’s something I really enjoy about the field. But that was a long time ago.
MTB: So you were majoring in astrophysics and you…
Nicholas Welch: Yes.
MTB: … decided to change your major and pursue…
Nicholas Welch: That’s right.
MTB: … linguistics?
Nicholas Welch: It took me about six months to decide, but that was it.
MTB: You were hooked.
Nicholas Welch: I haven’t looked back since then.
MTB: Yeah. And can you walk us through your fieldwork biography, so what languages you’ve worked with and when?
Nicholas Welch: So I had a similar sort of transformation during my graduate work. I had originally been interested in pursuing historical linguistics, historical syntax, in the Italic and Romance languages.
And then while I was doing my master’s degree, I took a survey course in the Dene languages of North America and fell in love with them from the first sentence that I heard in a Dene language. At that point, I started getting very interested in the process of language documentation. And the same term, I took a course in field methods, working with a speaker of a Dene language, and I decided to do my thesis on Dene morphosyntax. And I spent a summer doing fieldwork in the Northwest Territories of Canada in a community that speaks Tłı̨chǫ, which is… Its closest relatives are Dënësųłinë́ and North Slavey in the Dene language family. It’s spoken by around 2,000 people. It was a severely endangered language. There are signs now that it is actually beginning a process of recovery, thanks to language revitalization programs. And I’ve been doing fieldwork with speakers of Tłı̨chǫ since that time, up until the pandemic, at least. And since then, I’ve also added, I did fieldwork for a number of years on Tsuutʼina, another language of the same family, which is spoken near Calgary, Alberta.
And then recently, I have had a job for the last three and a half, four years at Memorial University of Newfoundland, which is very far from Dene country, and my work here focuses more on language revitalization than on documentation and fieldwork, and it’s concerned with the languages of this province, which are Inuttitut (which is a dialect of the Inuit family of languages), Newfoundland Mi’kmaq (which is a variety that no longer has first-language speakers, though there’s a reclamation program going on, and it’s an Algonquian language), and then Innu-aimun, another Algonquian language spoken in Labrador, where there are still many thousands of speakers. It’s one of the more vital Indigenous languages of Canada, although there are dangerous signs there, too, in the current generation of children; there are signs of language attrition beginning. And I guess, in amongst those, I’ve done fieldwork on a number of other languages, mostly surrounding the teaching of field methods classes, and there, it’s been fieldwork not in the field, in that we’ve brought speakers in to work with the class on campus.
MTB: Yeah. I’d love to hear more about your teaching of field methods, because this is something that we haven’t had so many people on the podcast who actually teach field methods. Can you tell us a little bit about your course? And like you said, with the pandemic, maybe it’s looked different for the last couple years than it would.
Nicholas Welch: It’s looked very different. So typically, what I do with this course is that it’s taught twice a week, and one session will be devoted to close work with a language speaker of a language that the students are unfamiliar with (usually, but not always, one that I’m also unfamiliar with), and the other session each week will be devoted to analysis of the sentences that were translated for us in the first session, plus preparing the elicitations for the next session, and in the process, going through concepts that may be necessary for understanding the week’s data and looking at typological characteristics of language in order to make sense of what we’ve heard and predict what may be coming next. And then toward the beginning of the term, I also have an intensive two- or three-week crash program in research ethics, best practices in field work, cultural considerations, things of that sort.
And I think that over the next few years, I’m also going to be tailoring this course a little bit to be more closely tied to another course that I teach on language endangerment and revitalization. So the field methods course is going to include more cultural information, more about how to use language documentation in the service of reclamation and revitalization, because I think we’re moving rapidly to a model where people tend to do fieldwork on their own languages, and where that fieldwork is often going to be used expressly to create materials for revitalization, so I think that the teaching of field methods should keep pace with that.
MTB: Yeah, it’s really exciting to see the shift in the field where before language revitalization was just something you kind of did on the side like, “Oh, yeah, well, maybe we’ll do a storybook or something later if we have time, if we have money,” and now it’s really integrated into the research project from…
Nicholas Welch: Yes.
MTB: … the start. So do you work with different speakers every semester or every term, and how do you meet these people? How do you find these people to work with the students?
Nicholas Welch: So typically, we recruit from the student body itself, and I try when I can to find speakers of Indigenous languages of this province. So at the moment, we’re working with a student who’s a speaker of Innu-aimun, the Algonquian language of Labrador. This person is not a linguist, she’s a psychology student, but she says as a result of working with the field methods class, she’s become more interested in language, and in fact, it’s likely that she’s going to be a research assistant in a revitalization project over the summer. So that was exciting.
MTB: That’s really cool.
Nicholas Welch: And at other times, if I can’t find a speaker of an Indigenous language, I will contact our university’s internationalization office and see if I can advertise for an international student who speaks a language that… not familiar to my class. In past years, we’ve worked with speakers of Swahili, of Twi Akan, a Niger-Congo language from the Atlantic group, and of Mauritian Creole, which was a lot of fun because it was so similar to French in many, many respects. And then every so often, something that would come along that was not like French at all and threw the students for a loop, so it definitely kept them on their toes. It was a really great speaker we were working with that year.
One of the things that I find most rewarding is when the speaker consultants take direction of the class, and they’ll translate something and then they’ll say, “Oh, well, that reminds me. We also can say it like this,” and then that starts a discussion about structure and about lexicon or what-have-you, different registers of speech, code-switching, all sorts of things that come out that would have been difficult to bring out using traditional linguistic elicitation, but that arise naturally when the speakers have more confidence and take more agency in the direction of the class. That’s a really rewarding thing.
MTB: Yeah, so much of it really depends on the speakers that you have, right? Like I’ve found that I’ve worked with a few speakers who, they just get it. They just have such high linguistic, metalinguistic awareness that I might have my little list of questions and they’re like, “Actually, we should really talk about this. You should be learning about this, Martha, because this is way more interesting,” and then it’ll go into a completely different direction. And that used to really stress me out when I was first doing my data collection because I was like, “Oh, I actually need this little list of questions,” but then those recording sessions ended up being the best ones that I had and what I based most of my PhD thesis on.
Nicholas Welch: Okay, fascinating. Yes. Well, yeah, it is, or should be, a process of bidirectional feedback, where the documenter and the consultant are in a process of collaborative discovery.
MTB: Definitely. Yeah, for sure. So, is this an undergrad, graduate class, and how many students?
Nicholas Welch: It’s cross-listed, graduate and upper undergraduate. At the moment, we’ve definitely felt some pandemic strain, and I’m working with a class of 14 students. Last year, we had about 20. And the year before that, we had 26.
MTB: Wow. It’s big.
Nicholas Welch: So… Yeah, big. That’s the highest it’s been in recent times, but then numbers declined again during the pandemic. It was actually in the middle of the term, when we were working with the speaker of Mauritian Creole, that the COVID lockdown started in this province, and so we were in a fully in-person class one week, and the next week, we were fully online. And actually, the transition went fairly smoothly, and I found that there are actually both positives and negatives to the online venue.
MTB: Oh, can you tell us more about positives? And maybe the negatives are fairly clear.
Nicholas Welch: The negatives are fairly clear. Not being able to work, you know, in person, and a lot of the spontaneity is not there anymore. One of the things about conferencing platforms, like this one, is that they typically are voice-activated, and they try to mute out non-voice sounds and mute one speaker while the other one is talking. All that is… It’s incredibly sophisticated technology, and it does wonders when everybody’s speaking a language that they all understand. But the voice activation means that there is a period of a few milliseconds at the beginning of every utterance when the system is detecting the presence of the voice and then switching itself on. And in practice, what that means is, every utterance has a few milliseconds clipped off the beginning, and so we have had to deal with that by having the speaker begin every translation with, “Well…”
MTB: Oh, wow. [laughs]
Nicholas Welch: [laughs] And that’s enough to get it to kick in so that we actually get an untruncated translation.
MTB: Oh, my gosh.
Nicholas Welch: But on the other side, there are advantages too. One of them is that all the students are equal distance from the speaker, and all of them can hear quite well, which is not always the case in the classroom. It means that when we’re working, as we are now, with a speaker who has a very soft voice, we’re still able to hear, whereas in some of the classroom sessions, that was challenging. It means that we automatically get a recording of the session without having to set up the field recorder. On the downside, the recording is not as good, generally. And also, again, with the speaker being present on everybody’s screens, everybody is able to read lips to a certain degree and get those visual cues that we might not get if people were sitting at a distance in a classroom. Especially sitting at a distance in a classroom where we’re all wearing masks, which is what we’ve been doing here for the last several weeks.
MTB: Yeah, yeah, definitely. That’s so interesting. I never would have thought of some of those things. As a native English speaker, I feel like you don’t… You take it for granted that a lot of this technology is made for us.
Nicholas Welch: Yeah, and it is an impediment to communication in those cases. Yeah.
MTB: Yeah. Yeah. I’d love to hear more about the revitalization projects. Maybe you could give some background about what is the situation with languages in Labrador and what revitalization efforts are going on.
Nicholas Welch: So there are two very different situations. In northern Labrador, the Indigenous language is Inuttitut, which is a variety of Inuktitut, and is mutually comprehensible with other varieties of Inuktitut across northern Canada. And Inuktitut as a whole is one of the more vital Indigenous languages of Canada. There are about 20,000 speakers, and there are children still learning it as the first language. It’s the language of education and business in a number of communities in Northern Canada. However, it is suffering severe attrition in some areas, and one of those is Labrador. And in Labrador, there are a few hundred speakers still, most of whom are older.
So this variety, Inuttitut, is quite severely endangered, and so revitalization is quite crucial. The Indigenous government of that region, the Nunatsiavut government, is running an intensive revitalization program that has several elements.
One of them is standard language classes at the elementary and high school level, and those are basically language exposure classes. You get half an hour to an hour a day, and we know it is good for sort of priming people to learn the language, but it doesn’t tend to produce speakers.
And another one is immersion classes, and of course, those tend to be somewhat better. The difficulty with immersion classes is that you need to have fully fluent teachers to teach them, and one issue at the moment is, the current crop of certified teachers who are fluent speakers of Inuttitut are all either retired or shortly retiring. And there is, at the moment, no teaching certification program that includes material on the structure, vocabulary, or the teaching of Inuttitut. So what that means is, fluent speakers who are rarer in the generations who would be going to get certified go, and they’re in an anglophone or francophone environment learning how to teach English or French as a second language, essentially, and then trying to use those methods, adapt those methods for the teaching of Inuktitut, which is a typologically extremely different language. So that is definitely a challenge.
And then the third prong of their approach is language nests and mentor-apprentice pairs, both of which are being used with some degree of success. The mentor-apprentice program in particular has produced some quite good high-school-to-20s-aged speakers, just simply by working with elders for hours a day. And during the pandemic, as I understand it, a lot of that has been online or by phone, and they’ve nevertheless managed to make progress.
MTB: Oh, that’s amazing.
Nicholas Welch: So that’s very exciting to hear about.
MTB: Yeah.
Nicholas Welch: Innu-aimun, in the communities of Natuashish and Sheshatshiu, is in a rather different situation. It’s one end of a chain of communities that stretches from Labrador through central and southern Quebec. There are about 10,000 to 12,000 speakers of the language in total, mostly in Quebec, about 2,000 in Labrador. Especially in Natuashish, the more northerly of the two Labrador communities, there are still large numbers of children who are growing up in the language. In Sheshatshiu, the other community, there are fewer of them. And in fact, it was a couple of years ago, there was a wake-up call. I was hosting a language workshop in the community, and we were training teachers in community linguistics. And two of the teacher participants reported that for the first time in their careers, they had entire classes of Grade 1 students who had Innu as a second language. So that was an alarm bell. And so, there’s…
MTB: Where it would have been the first language before for at least some of them?
Nicholas Welch: Previous to this, there would have been a majority of children coming into the classes for whom Innu was the first language and English the second. And in fact, just five or six years ago, one of the issues that the community was grappling with was how to help the students get further ahead in English. And now, of course, there’s the reverse problem. So there’s a lot of thought going into what the next steps are. I’m actually, over the summer, going to be conducting a fact-finding mission to look at the generation of Innu youth between, say, 18 and 25 years old, to look at what languages they use in what situations, what contexts, what domains, when do they use English, when do they use Innu-aimun, what are their attitudes and opinions around each language, and what are the events in their lives, what are their experiences that have led them to choosing one language or the other in a particular situation. And the aim is to discover what motivates people in this demographic in language shift or language preservation, and then to use that information to inform revitalization efforts by the community.
MTB: Is there, do they also speak French, or is it not so much?
Nicholas Welch: So one of the things that I think is actually a positive for the long-term prospects of the language is that the second language in Labrador is English, and in Quebec, it is French, and so if Innu people from Labrador meet up with friends and relatives in Quebec, they speak Innu-aimun because they do not have a second language in common. So in that way, Innu-aimun is still perceived as having a lot of utility. On the other hand, there’s a large degree of dialectal difference between many of the communities, both across the Labrador-Quebec border and even between the two Labrador communities. And so, mutual intelligibility is sometimes a bit of an effort, and if people from the two Labrador communities meet up, are they going to be using Innu-aimun? Are there situations where they might use English because their dialects are distinct enough that they’re having trouble comprehending? That’s one of the things that I would like to discover too, and the degree to which either of those situations occurs is something that I think is also going to be useful to the revitalization efforts there.
MTB: Yeah. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Okay, well, the last thing I wanted to, I just wanted to spend a few minutes learning more about your research with Dene languages. I think we kind of glossed over it before, but the majority of your work has been with Dene languages. So, can you share a bit more about your research interests, and if there’s future research in Dene languages that you are looking forward to doing or you think someone should do, could you share that with us?
Nicholas Welch: Sure. My research has focused on Dene morphosyntax, particularly on the syntactic side of things. Dene languages are famous in linguistics for the length and complexity of their verbal morphology, and so reams and reams and reams have been written about that. But a side effect of that has been that not very many people have looked at Dene syntax until relatively recently, and so I’ve done the bulk of my work on the syntax of Tłı̨chǫ. And it is a language in which there is quite a lot of information encoded within the verb itself, but there’s also a raft of post-verbal auxiliary verbs and particles of one sort or another that convey additional information. And so, you get temporal aspect being marked on the verb, but tense being marked by a post-verbal suffix or particle.
And one of the things that I have done in this language is to look at the ordering of the post-verbal elements, their interaction with semantic scope on the one hand, and on the other with grammaticality. So, flipping the order of some of the particles produces ungrammatical sentences, which tells you something about the structure. And I’ve been using this and also the concept of semantic obligatoriness, that is, whether leaving out a post-verbal particle will yield the opposite interpretation from leaving it in the sentence. And if something is obligatory for a particular semantic interpretation, that means that it’s doing something functional and is probably, in the terms of generative grammar, a functional head.
And I’ve managed to build up a quite cool little map of the outer periphery of the clause, and this has led to an idea that hasn’t yet borne fruition, but that I’m hoping to do, is to take this map that’s come out of the facts of this language, look at the semantic work that is being done by the various particles at the edge of the sentence, and then take that over to Innu-aimun and Inuttitut, which are languages of entirely different families (each one is as different from Tłı̨chǫ and from each other as Arabic is from Japanese), but look at all three of them and see if I can find the pieces that are doing the same semantic work, and see if there’s anything I can find out about ordering of those sentential elements in Inuttitut and Innu-aimun. It’s going to be more challenging because both of those are quite free word order languages…
MTB: Okay, I was going to ask about that, yeah.
Nicholas Welch: … which Dene languages typically are not. Yes. Right. So, it’s going to involve looking a lot more at scope, and a lot more at obligatoriness, and not so much at ordering.
MTB: Oh, that sounds tough.
Nicholas Welch: It’s going to be interesting. The obligatoriness angle is one that I think will prove very interesting. So, one of the areas is evidentiality. And in languages which have obligatory grammatical evidentiality…
MTB: Let’s explain evidentiality very quickly, so…
Nicholas Welch: Sure. Okay. So, evidentiality is the marking, either lexical or grammatical, of the source of the information that goes into an assertion. So, in English, if I say something like, “It’s snowing,” if I add the word “apparently” or if I say, “It seems like it’s snowing,” or if I say, “I gather it’s snowing,” all of those indicate that I’m getting the information from something other than my own eyes, so it’s saying the information is second-hand. And in some languages, this is marked by an obligatory grammatical element, and leaving it out has the implication that the information is first-hand. So, in Tłı̨chǫ, if you say zha at’ı̨, that means “It’s snowing.” However, saying zha at’ı̨ when you haven’t observed it yourself is at the very least infelicitous and borderline ungrammatical.
MTB: Okay.
Nicholas Welch: If the weather report is on, and somebody says it’s snowing, and then I go and report that to a friend, I’m not going to say zha at’ı̨, I’m going to say zha at’ı̨ nǫǫ̀, and the nǫǫ̀ at the end means “so I hear,” but unlike English, it’s an obligatory part of the sentence. I could just say in English “It’s snowing,” and that would still be a perfectly good sentence even if I hadn’t witnessed it myself. Now, there are some languages in which evidentiality is optional, as in English. There’s some in which it’s obligatory, as in Tłı̨chǫ. There’s some languages, like some of the Bantu languages, which have several different evidentiality markers that mark different degrees of evidentiality, whether something is hearsay, whether it’s based on observed clues but not witnessed first-hand, and so on. Innu-aimun has several different evidential markers. Which of them are obligatory, which of them are optional? Well, their semantics were investigated a number of years ago, but the facts about obligatoriness, nobody’s studied that. So that would be something to look at and something that I’m looking forward to looking at.
MTB: Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. That’s really exciting. Okay, well, thank you, Nicholas, so much for sharing your expertise with us. Where can people find you and read things that you have written if they want to learn more about your work?
Nicholas Welch: Well, my name is Nicholas Welch, and if you look on Google Scholar for “Nicholas Welch” and “syntax,” you will probably find some of my stuff. I have a webpage at Memorial University, mun.ca, and I’m in the Linguistics department. I have my page there under NWelch. I also have a YouTube channel that is called the Labrador Languages Preservation Laboratory, and I can supply links to all of these if you would like to post them on your post.
MTB: I will. Yeah, I’ll put them in the show notes so people can find them easily. Thank you so much.
Nicholas Welch: Thank you very much, Marti. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
You’ve been listening to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. This podcast is hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins with production help from Laura Tsutsui. Our music is by Lobo Loco, and our logo is by E.Vill Designs. If you have a question or a fieldwork experience to share, you can email us at fieldnotespod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram @lingfieldnotes. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave us an Apple Podcast review. Thanks for listening!
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