The Design and Implementation of Documentation Projects for Spoken Languages

The goal of this chapter is to provide a blueprint for planning a language documentation project. The scope is limited to the documentation of languages with average vitality but the chapter has relevance to other levels of endangerment as well. Language documentation is improved by key partnerships. By seeking out a supportive network of similarly motivated researchers, the language documenter can learn how to sequence and budget for documentation activities and how to plan workflow and data management so that dissemination and archiving goals are met. Implementing a documentation project as a lone academic or community member is possible, but having partners with complementary expertise can lead to the best results. Creating such teams requires funding and infrastructure so seeking out financial and institutional support is also part of the planning process for a documentation project.

Myaamiaataweenki

The discussion around indigenous language revitalization must include languages “reawakening” after a period of dormancy. New paradigms are needed to describe the developing role of reawakening languages, their impact on community and individual identity, and the necessary capacity-building to support their reconstruction and reintroduction into tribal society. If sleeping languages are excluded from the conversation, much will be lost in understanding minority language development and vitality for contemporary life within a larger dominant society. This chapter describes the development of a recently “reawakened” language that ceased to be spoken in the mid-twentieth century, and attempts to capture its developmental trajectory in the context of an evolving community-based educational system. The Myaamia language is emerging in new domains. It is driven by a collaborative effort of internal and external resources that demonstrate what is possible for a reclaimed language.

Corpus Compilation and Exploitation in Language Documentation Projects

This chapter analyzes the specific characteristics of corpora of endangered languages from a corpus linguistic perspective. Therefore it starts with a definition of the central notions of corpus and text and then investigates how the heterogeneous language documentation corpora may fit into a general typology of corpora. The third section looks at the genres and registers that for methodological and theoretical reasons are typical for language documentations, whereas the fourth section deals with the structure of corpora and how texts of a particular content, genre or register can be accessed in archives. The format of the texts, which are typically annotated audio and video recordings, is described in the fifth section and deals with metadata, transcription, orthography, translation, glossing, and syntactic annotation. How annotated corpora can be analyzed for grammatical and lexical research is shown in the sixth section. The last section summarizes the specific features of language documentation corpora.

Language Revitalization in Kindergarten

This study explores whether a Truku Seediq kindergarten immersion program in Taiwan has contributed to stemming indigenous language erosion. The preliminary results suggest areas for improvement in the ongoing project, and may serve as a starting point for future preschool indigenous language immersion programs. The project centers on five activities: (1) weekly culture-based language classes, (2) bimonthly teachers’ empowerment workshops, (3) online documentation of teaching processes and activities, (4) advisory visits and evaluations, and (5) development of pedagogical materials. Data were collected through focus group interviews, observations, advisory visits, and proficiency tests. The results show both that the immersion program improves the children’s proficiency and that it faces obstacles: lack of qualified teachers proficient in the language and culture-based teaching, insufficient hours of immersion and co-teaching with elders, imperfect communication in the administrative system, obstacles to collaboration with families and communities, and lack of effective pedagogical materials and proficiency tests.

Language Documentation in Diaspora Communities

Due to environmental, economic, and social factors, cities are increasingly absorbing speakers of endangered languages. In this chapter, the authors examine some of the ways that organizations can work with communities in an urban setting to further language documentation, conservation, and revitalization. They base their discussion on their experience at the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit organization based in New York City that facilitates collaboration between linguists, students, speakers of endangered languages, and other relevant parties. While ex-situ language documentation has not been given much attention in the literature, they argue that it has its own unique advantages and that diaspora communities need to be taken seriously, both to fully understand language endangerment and to better counteract it.

Introduction

The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages’ purposes are (1) to provide a reasonably comprehensive reference volume for endangered languages, with the scope of the volume as a whole representing the breadth of the field; (2) to highlight both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it; and (3) to broaden understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, and, in so doing, to encourage and contribute to fresh thinking and new findings in support of endangered languages. This chapter introduces the thirty-nine chapters of this Handbook, which are addressed to the themes and approaches in scholarship on endangered language and to these objectives of the book. The authors introduce the criteria for determining whether a language is endangered and just how endangered it is, address the causes of language endangerment, review the reasons for why the language endangerment crisis matters, and discuss the variety of responses to it.

The Status of the World’s Endangered Languages

This chapter provides an overview of the status of the world’s endangered languages, based primarily on data from the Catalogue of Endangered Languages. Difficulties in identifying and enumerating endangered languages and obstacles to assessing linguistic vitality on a large scale are discussed. Statistical overviews are provided of language endangerment by global region, comparing trends in language endangerment across the world. The availability (or widespread absence) of the kinds of data necessary to assess language endangerment is examined, and we encourage linguists to include these types of data in their field reports and other published work. Finally, widely circulated statistics of language endangerment and death are considered.

Training Language Activists to Support Endangered Languages

Training speakers of Mayan languages to be linguists is described over a forty-year period. Most Mayas who have participated in such training have been language activists as well, thus combining activism with being or becoming linguists. Three different phases in training are described, starting with extra-scholastic training in Guatemala before the civil war, its evolution after the war, and the shift to university training, especially graduate training, in the last fifteen years. The different components of the training programs are discussed, in particular how collaborations between a non-speaker linguist and speaker linguists developed and expanded. Linguistics training adds the analytical and scholarly aspects of language study to language activism, which is itself community based.

New Media for Endangered Languages

This chapter presents three technologies essential to enabling any language in the digital domain: language identifiers (ISO 639-3), Unicode (including fonts and keyboards), and the building of corpora to enable natural language processing. Just a few major languages of the world are well-enabled for use with electronically mediated communication. Another few hundred languages are arguably on their way to being well-enabled, if for market reasons alone. For all the remaining languages of the world, inclusion in the digital domain remains a distant possibility, and one that likely requires sustained interest, attention, and resources on the part of the language community itself. The good news is that the same technologies that enable the more widespread languages can also enable the less widespread, and even endangered ones, and bootstrapping is possible for all of them. The examples and resources described in this chapter can serve as inspiration and guidance in getting started.

The Goals of Language Documentation

How is language documentation defined and what constitutes language documentation? What counts as having an adequate language documentation, and how is that assessed? In this chapter we address these questions and attempt to provide useful perspectives on what must go into answering them.