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Speaking Place has helped communities reverse the trend of language and cultural decline going on worldwide.

Our integrated, multidisciplinary methods have evolved over four decades as we have collaborated with community groups to document Native American, Mexican, and immigrant communites leading to reviving endangered lanuage and cultures locally and regionally.

Totontepec team member Saul Reyes Cortes and Speaking Place Director, Ben Levine, training teams from 8 indigenous communities at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca.

Community video playback (feedback) in the home, with groups, and to the whole community sparks dialogue and action.

 

Chatino and Mixe teams reinforce community identity with visual documentation of natural group conversation.

Passamaquoddy elders using the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Lanuage Portal (PMPortal.org), an interactive archive of cummunity videos and dictionary built by Speaking Place, the University of New Brunswick, and Northeast Historic Film.

 

We are currently consulting, training, and supporting two Native American teams and teams from eight communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, in a project called TAVICO (Community Video Workshop of Oaxaca) — a model of regional indigenous language documentation and revival.

 

Our approach, called Community Self-Documentation, adapts to each community and leads naturally to language and cultural revival because it is based on creating broad community participation. Documenting the language locally increases its use, accessibility, and value.

Learn more about the Speaking Place approach to language revival in the Key Concepts section of the Archive. And please contact us to receive more examples of our work.