ICLDC 9 and ComputEL 8, March 2025

The 9th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) was a great success! From March 6-9, UHM Linguistics welcomed over 400 attendees to discuss the conference theme: Navigating new realities in diaspora communities. The conference consisted of over 170 talks, poster presentations, workshops, and talk stories. Ross Perlin and Rasmina Gurung (pictured) of the Endangered Languages Alliance gave the opening plenary, entitled “From Yul, Shöyul, and Phayul to the Vertical Village: Documenting and Developing Languages in the Urban Diaspora,” and Mary Therese Perez Hattori closed out the conference with her plenary, “Challenges of Diaspora Communities: A Pacific Islands Perspective.” Feedback from attendees called the conference “indispensable,” “the best conference in our field,” and “culturally enriching and intellectually stimulating.”

Throughout the conference the Endangered Languages Project hosted a video postcard booth; look for these stories from ICLDC coming soon! The conference was preceded by the 8th Workshop on Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (ComputEL-8) on March 4-5, featuring a keynote presentation by Bruce Starlight (Tsuut’ina Nation). 

Big congratulations to the organizers:

Gary Holton
Bradley McDonnell
N. Ha‘alilio Solomon
Jim Yoshioka

And student steering committee:

Nathan Adamson
Kelsey Bialo
Emma Breslow
Lauren Cornwell
Tyler Demmon
Stephanie Dossett
Orlyn Esquivel
Cole Flottman
Violet King
Cedar Lay
Clemens Mayer
Josiah Murphy
Sebastian Ohara-Saft
Gillian Sawyer
Carolyn Siegman
Augie Spendley
Yumi Standlee
Olivia Waring

And mahalo to the conference sponsors:

National Science Foundation
Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC), University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Ka Haka ’Ula O Ke’elikōlani College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawai’i at Hilo