Documentation and Language Learning: Separate Agendas or Complementary Tasks?

In the indigenous communities of the Malintzin volcano highlands in Mexico, in the border region of the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala, speakers of Nahuatl have responded variously to the displacement of their language. In a few localities, evidence of a significant erosion appears to have sparked increased interest in both documentation (e.g., preserving a record of extant traditional narrative) and second language learning of the indigenous language by first language speakers of Spanish, and by speakers of Spanish who were once fluent speakers of Nahuatl. Modest interest has been expressed in bilingual instructional models for public schooling for children who are first language speakers of Nahuatl. Even though a small number of towns in this region have maintained high levels of Nahuatl language proficiency across the population (approaching ninety percent in two cases) continued and most likely accelerated erosion in the coming years appears to be inevitable. All demographic and sociolinguistic indicators point in this direction. We report on advances that have been made in a project that seeks to combine the tasks of Documentation and Language Learning. The following argument is presented for wider discussion: that in fact there are no inherent conflicts of interest between scientists (internal and external to the speech community) and indigenous communities as a whole regarding the goals of language maintenance, language use, and research projects related to recording and preserving an archive of the language and its various discourse forms.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Perspectives on linguistic documentation from sociolinguistic research on dialects

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how sociolinguistic research can be applied to endangered language documentation field linguistics. It first provides an overview of the techniques and practices of sociolinguistic fieldwork and the ensuring corpus compilation methods. The discussion is framed with examples from research projects focused on European-heritage English-speaking communities in the UK and Canada that have documented and analyzed English dialects from the far reaches of Scotland to the wilds of Northern Ontario, Canada. The main focus lies on morpho-syntactic and discourse-pragmatic variation; however, the same techniques could be applied to other types of variation. The discussion includes examples from a broad range of research studies in order to illustrate how sociolinguistic analyses are conducted and what they offer for understanding language variation and change.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Documenting modern Sri Lanka Portuguese

Sri Lanka Portuguese (SLP) is a Portuguese-lexified creole formed during Sri Lanka’s Portuguese colonial period, which lasted from the early 16th century to the mid-17th century. The language withstood several political changes and became an important medium of communication for a portion of the island’s population, but reached the late 20th century much reduced in its distribution and vitality, having essentially contracted to the Portuguese Burgher community of Eastern Sri Lanka. In the 1970s and 1980s, the language was the object of considerable research and documentation efforts, which were, however, curtailed by the Sri Lankan civil war. This chapter reports on the activities, challenges, and results of a recent documentation project developed in the post-war period and designed to create an appropriate and diverse record of modern SLP. The project is characterised by a highly multidisciplinary approach that combines linguistics and ethnomusicology, a strong focus on video recordings and open-access dissemination of materials through an online digital platform (Endangered Languages Archive), archival prospection to collect diachronic sources, a sociolinguistic component aimed at determining ethnolinguistic vitality with a view to delineating revitalisation strategies, and a strongly collaborative nature. This chapter describes the principal outputs of the documentation project, which, in addition to a digital corpus of transcribed and annotated materials representing modern manifestations of SLP and the oral/musical traditions of the Burghers, also include the findings of the sociolinguistic survey, an orthographic proposal for the language, as well as the copies and transcriptions of hard-to-obtain historical sources on SLP (grammars, dictionaries, biblical translations, liturgical texts, collections of songs).Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (MDP0357) / Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (IF/01009/2012

Oral Literature in the Digital Age

Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilized as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers—ethical, practical and conceptual—in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature in the Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions

Locating Criticality in the Lexicography of Historically Marginalized Languages

In this contribution, we address a practice in which many field linguists working with endangered, Indigenous, and underresourced languages participate: the creation of a dictionary. In such lexicographical projects, there is an urgent need for language workers to become more aware of their own ideological and intellectual baggage and to explore how such projects can contribute to challenging harmful colonial research practices. Informed by long-standing traditions in lexicographical theory, this emerging self-awareness encourages researchers to reflect on the ways their dictionary work aligns with, or diverges from, established practices. We propose that by introducing a degree of criticality and self-reflexivity into lexicography, dictionary work with historically marginalized and underresourced languages can undergo an ethically productive and theoretical reorientation. We situate our contribution in the wider context of critical theory, decolonial studies, and critical Indigenous studies and in the growing literature on language reclamation and Indigenous methodologies

少数民族の消滅危機言語と民族意識に関する研究―中国雲南省プミ族を例として―

Tohoku University劉庭秀課

Cross-Language Poetics: Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Research Program

For creative writers and for readers, opportunities to work with language in ways that engage two linguistic systems and/or two writing systems continue to expand with the growing influence of international and regional lingua francas. At the same time, we have witnessed the continuing development of literary creation in languages with fewer speakers, even in communities facing the outright erosion and replacement of their language. Alongside the tendencies of globalization, literature has also become more diverse, a new recognition of multilingualism and multiculturalism emerging among writers and readers alike. The special circumstances of composition and understanding that the different kinds of language and cultural interaction highlight also present us with an opportunity to study what it is that is fundamental in verbal art. After reviewing three historical examples of European origin (in Section 2) we will turn our attention to problems of language, writing system and poetry in East Asia (in Section 3). The examples from history will help us to put the current situation of multilingual and multicultural contexts for literature into a broader perspective. This is will allow us to return to consider a proposal for research on cross-language poetics