Colloquium: Chris Rogers

Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/20/2025
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Category(ies)

Colloquia

Chris Rogers will present at this week’s Humanities Center Colloquium on Thursday, November 20 at 3:00 PM in 4010 JFSB. His presentation will explore how linguistic diversity reflects human interaction and creativity and why embracing it enriches our sense of self, strengthens communities, and deepens cultural understanding.

Title: Valuing linguistic diversity and language ecology: perspectives from the “field”

Language structure reflects a negotiation of interactions between humans within an ecolinguistic context. The diverse consequences of these interactions are uniquely transmitted, diffused, and accepted as authentic by, within, and across individuals and generations, creating the world’s staggering linguistic diversity. Valuing linguistic diversity entails not only understanding the mechanics of a language’s structure but also exploring the adaptive advantage that such structure provides language users, learners, and communities generally. However, in a global language-learning market that favors test scores and proficiency levels, this ecological context is often absent – in effect, overlooking the value of linguistic diversity. In this presentation, I report on collaborative fieldwork with speakers of two indigenous languages, namely Xinkan (Isolate: Guatemala) and Wao Tededo (Isolate: Ecuador), and look at some of the structural properties of each from an ecological perspective. The conclusion is that these languages – while having some crosslinguistically rare structural properties – are highly valued for their reflections of human creativity and uniqueness. This perspective on valuing linguistic diversity is essential for creating greater intercultural competence, stronger communities, and individual identities.

About our presenter:

Chris Rogers (Associate Professor, Linguistics) earned a B.A. in Spanish, an M.A. in Linguistics, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics (U of U). In his research, he focuses on language documentation, description, typology, and the value of linguistic diversity both globally and individually. His interest is primarily in the indigenous languages of Central and South America (though he has worked with other language groups and hopes to collaborate with more communities around the world). In his teaching, Chris insists that his students “get dirty with data” instead of keeping it at arm’s length, by immersing themselves in the practice of doing linguistic analysis. Currently, his favorite things to talk about are linguistic science communication, information packaging, precategoriality, semantic alignment, and objective characterizations of linguistic diversity within a community’s linguistic ecosystem. If he isn’t in his office, Chris is probably in the backcountry or dancing with his wife, Sarah.