The Language Documentation and Conservation Initiative at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Mānoa (UHM) has had a special focus on Austronesian and Asian languages. It has sup-ported and encouraged fieldwork on these languages, and it has played a major role in the development of vernacular language education programs in Micronesia and elsewhere. In 2003, the department renewed and intensified its commitment to such work through what I shall refer to in this paper as the Language Documentation and Conservation Initiative (LDCI). The LDCI has three major objectives. The first is to provide high-quality training to graduate students who wish to undertake the essential task of documenting the many underdocumented and endangered languages of Asia and the Pacific. The second is to pro-mote collaborative research efforts among linguists, native speakers of endangered and un-derdocumented languages, and other interested parties. The third is to facilitate the free and open exchange of ideas among all those working in this field. In this paper, I discuss each of these three objectives and the activities being conducted at UHM in support of them. 1. INTRODUCTION.1 It is likely that linguists of the future will remember this century as a time when a major extinction event took place, as an era when thousands of languages were abandoned by their speakers in favor of languages of wider communication. What i