Lenore Grenoble is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics at UChicago and director of the Arctic Linguistic Ecology Lab in Yakutsk, Russia.

I work on endangered languages. A lot of languages are lost because of language shift, which is when children don’t learn their parents’ language and learn another one—almost always a socially, politically, economically dominant language. Once you stop having future speakers, the language is in trouble. My research is mostly in the Arctic, but language endangerment is a global problem. People figure we’re going to lose 50 to 90 percent of the world’s languages this century.

Why should we care if these languages are lost? First, we are losing a huge amount of information about what human beings can do with language. Most of the world’s big languages—big in the sense of most widely spoken—are Indo-European, plus there’s Mandarin. They’re structured in very different ways than, say, Greenlandic. Greenlandic is polysynthetic, so a word often translates to a sentence, and if you didn’t know about languages like that, you wouldn’t think the human brain could do it. Or, if you just spoke English and Spanish, you wouldn’t imagine tonal languages could exist, right?

There are also studies showing strong links between access to your language and not just mental well-being but physical well-being: lower cholesterol, lower incidence of heart disease, lower blood pressure, lower diabetes. This is pretty sound medical evidence that access to your ancestral language is a protective factor in terms of well-being. And there are lots of data showing that people subsequently have remorse or grieve when a language is lost. Myaamia, which is spoken in Ohio, was completely lost, not spoken for generations, and then Daryl Baldwin, a member of the Myaamia tribe, decided to reclaim it and make it vital again. He got a master’s degree in linguistics, and then he started partnering with a linguist who was already studying the language, and they took legacy materials and looked at sister languages to build up the Myaamia language from scratch.

I’m working in Siberia and Greenland. In Greenland I’m working with the language Kalaallisut, or Greenlandic. In Siberia I’m working in the Sakha Republic, a large subnational territory in the Russian Federation that is six times the size of France. When I started in Siberia, I met first with an Evenki woman, Nadezhda Bulatova, a linguist who grew up with other Evenki people. When I first started doing fieldwork, anywhere I went, we went together. So people saw me as not a total outsider, which gave me a tremendous advantage. Still, it has been years of building trust. When working in Indigenous communities, you have to explain what you’re doing and why, and you have to be sure that it’s somehow relevant to them.

People want different things. Bulatova and I produced a book of folktales in the language of Evenki and brought that back to the Evenki people. In the 1990s, the local people were not so concerned about language shift. But now people want to teach the languages in the schools. Some people are just happy to have somebody to talk to. They’re in these isolated villages with no internet connectivity. I often get asked, “Why would an American come this far and study our language?” Once they see I’m genuinely interested, people love to talk about it.

Wei-Cheng Lin, AM’99, PhD’06, is an associate professor in Art History. He is faculty director of the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project and a steering committee member at the Center for the Art of East Asia.

I’m trained as a historian of Buddhist art. I worked at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which has a wonderful Buddhist sculptural gallery with all these fragments that were removed from Buddhist caves. I was stunned to see those fragments being displayed, so I studied them a lot. There are a couple of questions we have to ask. One is why the sculptures were broken. The second is why the fragments are here in the United States. During my doctoral research at UChicago, I went to China to a lot of the sites of origin of these artifacts. I studied the reasons and the time and space where they were taken away. Before I graduated from my program here, the Center for the Art of East Asia started the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project. When I returned to the University to become faculty in 2015, I took over a lot of the center’s projects. I’m very interested in digital technology, so it was really something I wanted to do.

A lot of Asian cultural artifacts were removed, transported, and dislocated by force during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then dispersed to different parts of the world into private hands or art collections. If you go to a museum, you see the artifact without the context. If you go to the original context, you don’t see the artifacts. We want to present a more complete view of the objects’ originality. We scan those dispersed artifacts and then digitally marry them with their sites of origin. If you go to the sites, you will see, for example, a Buddhist cave with statues without heads or with the arms broken. With digital technology, we can bring back those artifacts—not physically moving them but using digital 3D models to put them back in the 3D environment. So we can see the cultural heritage site with the missing artifacts again. We help students to study artifacts in context. We want to use this technology as a pedagogical tool. The younger students who are the natives of this digital world—this is the language of their visual knowledge.

When the project started, the challenge was more technical. The price of a scanner was really high, and the scanner was bulky and hard to move. Now the scanner is handheld, but challenges derive from the issue of digital property. Museums themselves are using the digital technology to document their collections. We make these 3D models. Who owns these files?

A lot of times we’ll talk about cultural heritage in a very physical way: We just have to get these things back. If any museum wants to repatriate all these artifacts back to China, I will say, “Sure, go for it.” But what’s next? Cultural heritage for me is not just about the physical entity but about the cultural meanings and connection to the modern world—about how we can make those artifacts speak to us again. Digital technology can do so much right now to bring about a kind of modern or contemporary imagination of the past. The digital model provides a great number of possibilities and at the same time will help to preserve the physical artifact for a longer time. I think when we talk about sustainable cultural heritage, digital technology will be a major trend in the future.