Language Landscape: Supporting community-led language documentation

Different groups have differing motivations for participating in language documentation projects. Linguists want to increase our knowledge of languages and linguistic theory, but constraints on their work may lead to issues with their documentation projects, including their representations of the languages they study. Native speakers participate to maintain and develop their language, and may choose to represent it in a way which showcases their culture and attitudes. In order to encourage more native speakers to take part in documentation projects, a simple integrated system is required which will enable them to record, annotate and publish recordings. Language Landscape, our web-based application, enables native speakers to publish their recordings, and Aikuma, a mobile application for documentation, enables them to record and orally translate recordings, in both cases with minimal cost and training required. Language Landscape benefits communities by allowing them to document their language as they see fit, as demonstrated by our outreach program, through which some London school children created their own projects to document their own languages and those spoken around them.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Sociolinguistic spaces and multilingualism: practices and perceptions in Essyl, Senegal

This thesis explores the perceptions and practices of multilingualism in Essyl, Senegal, by considering how these are used and construed in sociolinguistic space. Based on fieldwork conducted in the village of Essyl, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, this thesis explores how mobility and spatiality affect both the practices and discursive ideologies of multilingualism in a rural setting from an ethnographic perspective. In order to do this, the thesis addresses the following topics: participants’ life trajectories and the relationship with their linguistic repertoires; what patterns of language use are observed in natural discourse data; perceptions of space and multilingualism by considering approaches to language territorialisation and translanguaging. Firstly, in the three introductory chapters, I present the research area and overview of the wider sociolinguistic setting in Senegal, before moving on to a review of multilingualism and presenting relevant concepts and approaches. Subsequently, I discuss in detail the qualitative methodology behind the thesis focusing on ethnographic methods and triangulation of analyses. There follows three descriptive chapters: firstly, I present the linguistic repertoires of key participants, before describing various patterns of mobility in the following chapter and how those relate to both repertoire expansion and perceptions of multilingualism, while in the last descriptive chapter I focus on examining multilingual linguistic practices in Essyl from various viewpoints. In the final chapters of the thesis, I discuss how participants orient towards diverse, yet inclusive, linguistic practices, and how these are linked to perceived monolingual and multilingual sociolinguistic spaces through processes of erasure and indexicality by way of language territorialisation. I further show how the validity of established concepts such as code are called into question, when taking into account different scales and perspectives of the practices and perceptions of multilingualism in Essyl, Senega

Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures

This presentation was given at the World Oral Literature Project 2012 workshop Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures.languagelandscape.org is a website designed to map language recordings where they were made. Users add audio or video recordings to the map and supply a wide range of linguistic and contextual annotation. The recording is then shown on the map where users can listen to it and browse the associated metadata. We have designed a flexible data schema which supports intelligent querying of the recording database allowing, for example, users to search for all recordings within a language family and then see all recordings on the map. The project has three main goals. The first is to offer speakers of minority and endangered languages an online platform where they can represent their language and culture. We also want to encourage more people to provide and access language data on the website in the hope that this will help raise awareness about language endangerment and related issues. Finally, we want to experiment with an innovative way of mapping languages. We map individual instances of language use according to where they happened. The resulting map is a series of snapshots of people engaging in communication at a certain time and place. We hope that as the project grows our underlying schema will facilitate mining of the data to reveal empirical patterns of global language use