Following his lecture about Catanduanes Component of the Bikol Multilingual Corpus at Catanduanes State University (CatSU) on June 26, 2023, Bikolano linguist and Ph.D. student-researcher from the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, Louward Allen Zubiri encouraged language faculty members from CatSU to contribute to the  Bicol Multilingual Corpus (BMC) Project, the largest corpus of child-directed and child speech in any Philippine language.

According to Zubiri, faculty-participants from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHUMSS) and College of Education (COEd) can build the Northern Catanduanes subcorpora by focusing on the varieties on the northern part of the island and investigating the intergenerational transmission through documentation of the input to and output of multilingual Bikolano children.

Through this community-driven initiative, faculty members will be capacitated to conduct their own research on the Catandunganon Bikol language using various linguistic approaches, further strengthening CatSU’s advocacy in promoting inclusivity and language diversity on the island through community-based research.

Upon the project’s completion, the BMC will serve as a model for combining language acquisition and documentation techniques to study the language development and use of emergent multilingual children.

The Hawai’i-based linguist likewise pledged to come back to the island next year to conduct a seminar-workshop on language documentation and its methodologies.

Zubiri was invited to serve as the speaker on the above-cited lecture which was spearheaded by the CatSU Research and Development Services (RDS) in collaboration with the Center for International Relations and Continuing Professional Development Services (CIRCPDS).

Presently, he is also a Visiting Research Fellow for Summer 2023 at his alma mater school, UP Diliman, where he completed his BA and MA in Linguistics.