Pre-CHiN Activities

Chamorro at the University of Bremen 1998-2009

When Thomas Stolz became a full professor at the University of Bremen in 1998, he immediately started to strengthen the already existing contacts with people in Guam. Rosa Salas Palomo and Robert A. Underwood Jr. were invited to the conference Lo propio y lo ajeno en las lenguas austronésicas y amerindias – Procesos interculturales en el contacto de lenguas indígenas con el español en el Pacífico e Hispanoamérica (The own and the foreign in Austronesian and Amerindian languages – intercultural processes) in the contact of indigenous languages with Spanish in the Pacific and Latin America (http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/homepages/stolz/tagungen/amerindisch/amerindisch.htm, held in Bremen in 1999, organised by Thomas Stolz and Klaus Zimmermann, financed by the Volkswagen Foundation) where they presented two talks. Rosa Salas Palomo received a second invitation to the conference Romanisation world-wide (held in Bremen in 2005, organised by Thomas Stolz, financed by the Volkswagen Foundation). Thomas Stolz, Dik Bakker and Rosa Salas Palomo are the co-editors of the three volumes of articles which resulted from this conference (published separately with Mouton de Gruyter 2008 and Brockmeyer 2009).

Thomas Stolz taught his first structure course Chamorro in summer term 1996 at the University of Bremen. The second followed a year later in summer term 1997. In a series of five consecutive courses (from summer term 2005 to summer term 2007), Stolz prepared his students for a two weeks field-trip to Guam which took place in May 2007. Part of the preparation was a three days intensive field-work simulation with Captain Peter John Santos who at that time was stationed in Germany and kindly worked with Stolz's group in Bremen. Erikarose Camacho – also stationed in Germany – taught a full-day workshop of Chamorro dance and culture in January 2007 at the Tanzschule Renz in Bremen as part of the field-work preparation. The dance workshop counted 80 participants from all over Germany. The field-work simulation had an attendance of 24 students. The group of students who took part in the field-trip to Guam was eleven strong (representing U.S. American, German, Rumanian, and Turkish nationalities). This excursion was generously financed by the University of Bremen.

One of the effects of the trip to Guam is the current official partnership between the University of Guam and the University of Bremen. Of the eleven (female) students who went to Guam four are currently writing their M.A. theses on Chamorro topics and two are selected for work on Chamorro-related PhD-theses.

These PhD-theses form part of the project devoted to the old sources in and on Chamorro. To prepare this project, Thomas Stolz organised an international workshop Philippine and Micronesian Linguistics before the Advent of Structuralism (held at the University of Potsdam in August 2008, financed by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation). Half of the workshop programme focused on grammatical and lexicographic treatises of Chamorro written originally in Spanish, Dutch or German. Scholars from Germany, Japan, Spain, the Netherlands, and the U.S.A. attended. The project proceedings are currently under review for publication with a major publishing house in Europe.

From all these activities, the idea emerged that the time is indeed ripe to found an international association of Chamorro linguistics – CHIN. In Potsdam it was agreed that a follow-up meeting was called for. This follow-up meeting became the Chamorro Day celebrated on 27 October, 2009 during the Festival of Languages in Bremen. On this day, CHIN – Chamorro Linguistics International Network saw the light of day.