Every morning in New Taipei City, Coleton Hast boards the subway and rides into a day of total language immersion — intensive Mandarin study, one-on-one sessions, conversational practice and hours of homework. This summer, the Brown University doctoral student is spending eight weeks at Tamkang University in Taiwan as a recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship, a fully funded program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. But Mandarin is only part of his mission. Hast is an anthropologist who studies how to keep endangered Indigenous languages alive, and Taiwan is the perfect place to do it.
It’s something of a homecoming. Hast earned his master’s degree in ethnic relations and cultures from National Dong Hwa University’s College of Indigenous Studies in Taiwan. "I just really fell in love with the place, and being back in Taiwan again is grounding for me," he said. "You can get a bit of tunnel vision when you’re just reading and writing about things. But being here reminds me of the stakes — that this is a real place, with real communities facing real challenges."
His path started in high school in Indianapolis, where he loved English and theater and realized the common thread was language itself. He studied Chinese at Indiana University Bloomington and found his cause: helping communities whose languages were endangered by colonialism, assimilation and education policies. "The right and privilege to be able to speak your own" is what keeps him going, he said.
Taiwan is unusually rich ground for this work — it is the ancestral homeland of all Austronesian languages, a vast family that includes Hawaiian, Samoan and Indigenous languages of the Philippines. Hast works primarily with the Amis language, also known as Pangcah. His research has examined the Amis Wikipedia and the Amis Ministry of Education Dictionary, an online dictionary built through partnerships with language activists and open-source civic hackers.
What fascinates Hast is how emerging tools — artificial intelligence and open-source digital platforms — can support communities. His work has illuminated vital conversations around Indigenous data sovereignty, ensuring that local communities keep control over how their language and data are preserved and shared. "As a linguistic anthropologist, language exists between people and in community, not just in a textbook or app or AI model," he said.
At Brown, Hast works under Associate Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics Paja Faudree and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Joshua Babcock, and he has expanded his research through the University's Center for Digital Scholarship. His summer in Taiwan is helping prepare him for the years of fieldwork and dissertation research ahead.
"Language study is something we cannot take for granted. It deserves our support and it deserves our funding, because experiences like this are how we become better scholars and better citizens of the world."