Native speakers as documenters: a student initiative at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

The Language Documentation Training Center (LDTC), a student-run initiative in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Miinoa, is an innovative program which brings native speakers into the field of documentary linguistics and elevates their roles to central participants in the documentary process. At LDTC, graduate students in linguistics partner up with native speakers of underdocumented languages during a series of workshops where native speakers learn best practices in documentary linguistics. While the linguistic training is pared down to the skills and knowledge relevant to the native speakers' languages, the documentary training empowers the speakers to undertake further documentation efforts in their own communities. This paper details the methods and practices of the LDTC