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EIU Phi Beta Kappa

The Phi Beta Kappa Association of East Central Illinois gives local PBK members the opportunity to extend the organization’s goals of academic excellence, civic engagement, and entrepreneurial brilliance well beyond the walls of their undergraduate institution.

Our events and activities, such as the Fall Lecture Series, the Young Scholars Award, and the Frank McCormick Study Abroad Scholarship, are some of the ways in which we hope to foster the love of learning and the high standards of PBK within our community. All Phi Beta Kappa members are, regardless of institutional affiliation, invited to participate in our programs.



30th Annual PBK Fall Lecture

Dr. Douglas Wharram

Ukâlagasuanik: Linguistic Diversity and Why it Matters

5:30 p.m. | Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022 | Lecture Hall, Doudna Fine Arts Center

Co-sponsored by the Redden Foundation, Mary Coon Cottingham Fund, EIU Department of English, EIU Center for the Humanities, EIU Department of World Languages and Cultures, and the PBK Alumni Association of East Central Illinois.

We live in an age of mass language extinction. Currently, on average, a language disappears approximately every 13 days, and the rate of language extinction is accelerating. Some twenty years ago, on average, the rate of language disappearance was approximately one every 14 days. By all reasonable accounts, between 50% and 90% of the languages currently spoken will become extinct by the end of THIS century. Dr. Wharram considers some of the implications of this, and describes his experiences working with Labrador Inuit around issues of language maintenance and revitalization.


Dr. Douglas Wharram (Ph.D. University of Connecticut) is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Trained as a formal semanticist and syntactician, Dr. Wharram remains an active researcher in those fields, but is primarily being invited on the basis of his collaborative work on the documentation and revitalisation of Rigolet Inuktut and Labrador Inuttut, dialects of Inuktitut, and of his co-teaching, alongside native speakers of the language, of Labrador Inuttut courses in Newfoundland and various communities in Labrador. Winner of multiple major research grants in Canada, he has published widely on languages of north-eastern Canada.



Related Pages

Phi Beta Kappa National Society Phi Beta Kappa Association of the Chicago Area Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Illinois

Contact Information

Dr. Suzie Park

Department of English
Coleman Hall
Eastern Illinois University
sapark@eiu.edu


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