Welcome to the HALA Project

Concern over the perilous plight of a large portion of the world’s languages has far outstripped the development of the methods needed to assess the state of their decline and to monitor the success of revitalization efforts. To date, researchers have been forced to rely on indirect and informal measures of language loss and endangerment—anecdotal reports by field workers and self-assessments by the speakers themselves in response to questionnaires, census surveys, and the like. In many cases, this information simply confirms a decline that is already firmly entrenched, perhaps irreversibly, for lack of earlier indications of endangerment.

The Hawai‘i Assessment of Language Access (HALA) project offers a simple and effective way to assess language strength in bilinguals. Based on independently established psycholinguistic principles, the HALA tests exploit the fact that the relative strength of two (or more) languages is reflected in the speed with which their words and structure-building routines are accessed in the course of speech. Test results can therefore be used to assess language attrition and revitalization in bilingual communities of many different types. Indeed, the HALA tests are designed to be language-neutral; they can be used to investigate any combination of languages.