Please join the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences on Thursday, March 16 at 4:30 p.m. in 2017 Dunton Tower for the 2023 Marston LaFrance Lecture with Professor Erik Anonby of the Department of French and the School of Linguistics and Language Studies.

In this lecture, titled “The Impossible Language Atlas: A Year in the Life of the Atlas of the Languages of Iran”, Prof. Anonby will discuss his work leading an international team of 60 researchers in an ambitious major language atlas project.

Since the 1950s, there has been a succession of major language atlas projects, but none has ever been completed. The latest project to attempt this “impossible” goal is the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI). Initiated in 2014 by Dr. Erik Anonby, work has proceeded slowly but steadily, grappling with an absence of language-related census information, starkly contrasting perspectives on language identity and distribution, and perennial challenges of funding, logistics, and project design. These complications have resulted in an unexpectedly resilient field research process that navigates international and domestic events of major proportions, widespread internet outages, and a host of disruptions brought about by COVID-19.

This talk reflects on challenges, accomplishments and surprises in the life of the Atlas over the past year. Highlights include the importance of local, spoken placenames and their role as part of language distribution maps; creation of a detailed attribution framework that recognizes the contributions and intellectual property of individual consultants and researchers; and curating audio and video recordings as linked open data, accessible in a public archive. Finally, a series of first-ever detailed language distribution maps for individual provinces of Iran will be unveiled.

Dr. Erik Anonby is a Professor in the Department of French and in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies (SLaLS) at Carleton University. His research interests include language documentation and revitalization, community-based language mapping, and collaborative development of orthographies for unwritten languages. He leads an international team of 60 researchers in the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI).