Mission

The Indigenous Languages Centre aims to:

  • maintain and develop ongoing partnerships with Indigenous communities engaged in language revitalization efforts;
  • provide academic support for community-based efforts to revitalize seriously endangered languages in Indigenous communities throughout British Columbia and neighbouring areas;
  • offer research expertise with a focus on Indigenous language revitalization theory and practice in communities;
  • support language curriculum development, and facilitate research in the applied and descriptive linguistics of critically endangered languages; and
  • facilitate communication between Indigenous communities and the university.

Goals

The Indigenous Languages Centre will also use an integrated approach to research in language revitalization. The Indigenous Languages Centre will collaborate with specific Indigenous language communities and their organizations to:

  • support local Indigenous language learning in a safe environment while maintaining high academic standards, in collaboration with Indigenous community organizations;
  • work in concert with academic programming in Indigenous languages offered by SFU to improve effectiveness and impact of this programming;
  • deliver support for local Indigenous language learners and instructors by facilitating language curriculum design, language course and lesson planning, student assessment, and evaluation formats as part of the centre's focus on research in language revitalization;
  • conduct collaborative research on best practices and locally practicable solutions in Indigenous language revitalization and maintenance;
  • enable, attract and conduct collaborative research with First Nations communities in applied linguistics of Indigenous languages, including, e.g. pedagogical grammars of Indigenous language proficiency, and multimedia design and online delivery of First Nations language learning;
  • attract graduate students doing research in various fields relevant to Indigenous languages and linguistics, community language revitalization, language planning and documentation; and
  • facilitate networking and collaboration among Indigenous language learners of diverse languages to share successes, challenges, learning and teaching methodologies, research projects and results.