16:13:12 Hello everyone I'm in Henninger and I'm a liaison librarian with university Canada West.
16:13:21 Hello everyone I'm Nadia Caidi. I am aProfessor at the Toronto, I school. I live in the lands on which the University of Toronto operates for thousands of years, it has been the traditional Land of the Huron when dad was cynical, and most recently, the Mississauga as of the credit River.
16:13:36 It is home to six indigenous language families including over 18 unique languages and dialects, and I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the traditional and unseated territories of the Muslims Squamish and slave to the First Nations, who speak the
16:13:52 homecoming him and Squamish languages, among others. We need these peoples and these languages here, because the issues around them the suppression of indigenous languages by colonizers, the ongoing work to revitalize those languages by indigenous peoples
16:14:07 show recognition by both colonizer and colonized have the facts that languages have power that they are part of people's cultures and identities, and that they're part of the struggle for social justice, all of these tie into our topic for today, which
16:14:20 is linguistic justice in libraries, we come to this topic from different backgrounds, but we both have experience in linguistically diverse environments, including library and educational settings that we bring to our understanding of the existing research
16:14:34 literature and vice versa.
16:14:37 Our main argument is that multilingualism, which is the existence of different languages in our lives as well as variation within with languages remains, understand it in libraries and is rarely discussed in four included in discussions over equity,
16:14:53 diversity and inclusion.
16:14:56 There are many possible reasons for this. One is that languages can hear less immediately visible form of difference librarianship is also not very diverse to begin with, English, remains extremely dominant within the field, and both English and libraries
16:15:14 have been part of the assimilation of immigrants and indigenous peoples in Canada and in the US. All this reasons can create gaps in our awareness and our approach to API.
16:15:28 However, languages are not inherently neutral, and they are part of part of people's cultures, the components of different languages in different contexts can create barriers to access equity inclusion, and even to identity formation and validation.
16:15:45 Such barriers inhibit the free and equitable sharing of resources and information.
16:15:51 Someone whose first language, whose first language is not English with French. I have seen firsthand the frustration that my accent causes sometimes, whether to others, at the library service desk or to myself in interactions with automated phone systems
16:16:09 or zoom transcriptions several times, they have had to turn the phone over to a friend or partner to literally speak for me, or recall how frustrating and humiliating those experiences where both of us have seen people judge staff, or library users who
16:16:28 have accents, or who, whose English was not good enough.
16:16:33 Or we have seen non English collections was sitting less cataloging and attention that English ones that do such behaviors help people feel welcome are really really serving all our communities when we act this way, where, and why do we assume that people
16:16:50 must learn English in order to engage with the library. So the overview that as library professionals, we need to ensure that all language learners and speakers, including library staff can feel welcomed included and we presented by the library.
16:17:07 And so we propose linguistic justice as an idea that can inform our thoughts and actions in LS and help answer these kinds of questions, a linguistic justice has been explored in other fields for some years now and does the word justice suggests, this
16:17:21 term simply means giving people what is fair and just on the basis of language, how it should be applied is often debated, but a key idea running through many of its definitions is that discrimination on the basis of language goes against the inherent
16:17:34 worth of people and languages, and that this discrimination can take place, not just through explicit words and actions, such as somebody saying this is Canada speak English, but also through more implicit discourses and ideologies, in the context of
16:17:50 libraries, we think, linguistic justice means that access to information should ideally occur regardless of, or perhaps, especially because of the languages that people do or don't speak.
16:18:15 in isolation, it is absolutely connected to other aspects of racial indigenous social justice, but for the sake of analysis, it's important to take it out and look at it on its own because libraries are such linguistic spaces.
16:18:20 They have textual content such as collection signage websites catalogs and verbal content in areas such as programming and reference interactions libraries are also sites where language learning and socializing takes place for a variety of people mostly
16:18:32 passively, but occasionally more actively through language learning programs or collections.
16:18:38 And so regardless of whether we know it, we have the power to model what it means to be a library in terms of language, and so we need to look at how we do so, there is clearly much more that libraries can do to give languages and their speakers the support
16:18:48 they deserve. And so the question becomes what can we do about it. We hope to do more in this area going forward. But for now, leave us a few ideas for action beyond simply educating yourselves about the complexity of language and promoting the resources
16:19:10 and services that you already provide.
16:19:14 To start with we need to acknowledge linguistic literacy as a part of information literacy because access to additional languages can lead to different kinds of skills and approaches in navigating the information landscape.
16:19:29 We also need to recognize and compensate staff who speak additional languages on the job because that represents additional skill and labor.
16:19:38 We need also to develop policies and practices in libraries to support language communities, and we can recognize language as an essential aspect of cultures health and will be need to develop community partnerships just support learning opportunities
16:19:55 through reading intergenerational learning heritage language learning and storytelling.
16:20:02 And finally we can create communities of practice for librarians to share strategies and experiences aimed at supporting all these other ideas with actions such as these, the entire community those interested in learning a language those who already know
16:20:16 it, and the libraries that hold so many language resources can work together towards linguistic justice. So thank you for your attention and we look forward to hearing from you.
16:20:27 Thank you.