The uses of documentation in language revitalization efforts

Leanne Hinton and Daryl Baldwin

The projects documenting endangered languages being supported by DOBES are of great importance to the fields of Linguistics and Anthropology, but have even greater implications for future generations of the communities being documented.  This prediction is based on the current example of how the descendents of the speakers of now-dormant languages are utilizing documentation in the United States.  At the University of California at Berkeley, there are massive archives of materials on California Indian languages, some 35 of which have no native speakers left today.  About 90% of the visitors studying these materials are native people trying to learn their language or develop language programs in their communities.  We hold a biennial one-week workshop for California Indians on how to read and utilize these materials.  At the most recent workshop, the participants represented 25 languages without speakers.  Through the workshop and individual scholarship on the part of native people, languages without native speakers are beginning to be spoken again.  The California experience is also repeated elsewhere in the United States as an increasing number of Native Americans seek to recover their lost languages.  Hinton will speak of this phenomenon and of some issues for data collection, publication and archiving that arise from it.

Daryl Baldwin, a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, will speak on his community's experience of language recovery.  The last person who had ever learned Miami as a first language died in the early '60's, but nearly 300 years of documentation of the language has made it possible for Baldwin to learn his ancestral tongue and make it the language of his home, including his wife and four children.  He has become a leader in the reacquaintance of the Miamis with their linguistic heritage.  This path of learning has provided insight for the Miami into a hidden value of early language documentation.  The language reclamation process for this community has brought to light some unexpected outcomes, which are now beginning to shape individual and eventually community identity and knowledge.  Simply put, exposure to the language has not only provided an avenue for the community to grow culturally and linguistically, but in many ways has created an environment of sharing and healing from historic wounds. Baldwin will speak  about these experiences and what they mean to him and his community.

A delicate balance: dynamics of collaboration in critically endangered language documentation

Patricia Shaw / Larry Grant

Conducting linguistic fieldwork in an endangered language community - perhaps most particularly where language loss has been precipitated under extreme and persistent colonial suppression - is generally not simply a matter of straightforward data elicitation and analysis on the part of a well-trained academic linguist. Rather, a complex set of non-linguistic social, psychological, political dynamics - often tacit and generally highly conflicted - may be at play and may seriously inhibit even the most sincere academic efforts to contribute to effective and efficient language documentation.

The paper discusses some of the fundamental principles which have guided a collaborative program between the university and a gravely
endangered language community in British Columbia over the past seven years (within which period the population of fluent speakers has declined from 5 to 0). From the outset, the project has been dedicated not only to language documentation and linguistic analysis, but also to curriculum development and to adult language education with the goal of language revitalization. The principal rationale for the pedagogical component aimed to address the fact that the parenting generation had not acquired the language and hence could not serve as speaker role models for their children (who were of course ultimately the most important target constituency for carrying the language on to subsequent generations) in either home or school environments. Whereas the time investment required for curriculum development (a high priority community-level goal) might have been deemed to detract valuable time from documentation (a high
priority linguistic goal), on numerous occasions it had unanticipated and positive consequences in pushing the research documentation into domains which would otherwise not have been pursued in such detail. A further benefit is that discussion of such cases brings the relevance of research directly into the classroom context thereby mentoring community members in how to identify gaps in a research paradigm and define hypothesis-testing strategies.

A major dynamic requiring balanced resolution in order for productive language documentation to proceed is the issue of control: control over who does the research, with whom, who defines the research agenda, and - with potentially profound implications - who has copyright over the research products. A number of important issues pertaining to negotiating such research protocols for the conduct of linguistic fieldwork will be discussed. On the one hand, a research framework based on community collaboration entails the implementation of a variety of cooperative methodologies which might be resisted or dismissed from the traditional perspective as detracting both time and focus from the linguist's major goals. We conclude however that ultimately this approach significantly
enhances rather than detracts from the over-arching goals of language maintenance and revitalisation. That is, in order to reverse the tide of language loss and foster long-term minority language stability, there must be a reciprocal acceptance of responsibilities that ensure the effective transfer of control to the community level, and concomitantly establish a solid skills base at the community level that can successfully assume and perpetuate that control. This transfer of skills to community members in the context of a collaborative research team is one of the major contributions a linguist can make to language maintenance and revitalization.

 

A software platform for multimedial representation of linguistic data (MIRANDA) has been developed to approach the following goals:

—    Language data can be displayed and processed in various modes (audiovisual, audio, orthographic) simultaneously or alternatively.

—    Raw data can be analyzed linguistically, and analyses at various linguistic levels can be displayed and processed in parallel.

—    Linguistic units and structures are stored in a database; tokens appearing in utterances are, technically, copies from types stored in the database.

At the current stage of its development, MIRANDA provides the following features:

—    It is written exclusively in HTML and Javascript. Consequently, it is independent of operating system platforms and can be accessed from the intranet and the internet, also by native communities.

—    It has a completely open and flexible structure. Consequently, it is easily integrated with other applications.

—    As a user interface, it only presupposes a web browser (Mozilla, Netscape, IE) with an installed RealPlayer One (video/audio data are streamable) and fonts.

—    The screen is subdivided into three areas:

1. video area, also for audio visualization,

2. text area for display of complete text,

3. area for multilinear representation of the utterance currently played, in representation formats (phonetic, native orthographic, transliteration, interlinear morphemic gloss, free translation etc.) to be chosen by the user.

—    The timeline associated with area 1 controls automatic progress of a highlighter migrating through area 2 and the sentence being displayed in area 3.

—    Selected utterance can be played and displayed at a mouse click.

—    Tree diagram of each sentence (read from the database) can be displayed.

—    At a click on a word, its lexical entry, including a video and audio file, is displayed.

—    The lexical items contained in the database can be sorted and displayed in various formats.

—    Grammatical or cultural comments can be associated and displayed with each utterance.

—    Links to different kinds of data use normal browser technique.

—    Internal representation format for linguistic data is UTF8. Export and import conversion with other formats (including XML, ELAN) is easy.

MIRANDA is therefore appropriate as a tool in the documentation and visualization of data from endangered languages. It will demonstrated with data from Hocank.

Hennie Brugman / Romuald Skiba

 Annotations, descriptive texts that refer to some part of a primary source, have existed for a long time. Traditionally, annotations could take a wide range of heterogeneous forms. In our presentation, we will show historical examples that illustrate different form aspects. The oldest examples stem from the 18^th century. Two domains of linguistic inquiry – language acquisition research and ethnographic linguistics – have contributed considerably to the emergence of modern annotation systems. In the course of their development these domains have shaped the forms and functions of annotations continuously.

Early annotations were conceived of as preliminary research notes, they built the basis for later analyses and were only rarely published. Traditionally, annotations contained:

1)     primary linguistic data and other observational data (e.g. detailed temporal information and the speech samples),

2)     interpretations, e.g. comments concerning meaning and use of certain utterances,

3)     results of analyses (e.g. morpho-syntactic descriptions of the data),

4)     and a variety of ad hoc remarks.

In traditional annotation texts, the elements of this list were mixed and their relative weight differed tremendously. The text type ‘annotation’ had a relatively informal structure.

This free way of noting down research data was still popular in the middle of the 20^th century. The situation changed when empirical linguistics gained more and more influence and tape recordings became possible due to the technical development. As a consequence, annotations became much more structured and conventionalized. Researchers aimed at:

1)     more formal content of annotations: for example, an exact representation of phonetic details and of the temporal dimensions of primary data (e.g. through the development of IPA and other conventions for transcription)

2)     more formal structure of annotations: for example, the separation of primary linguistic data from parallel information (e.g. the tier structure);

Recent development is closely related to the availability of digital audio and video files. Modern computer-aided annotations emerged, in which digitized primary data are the basis and the point of reference of linguistic annotations. Modern annotation tools facilitate direct access to the underlying media and thus profoundly influence the annotation process and it’s end products. Still they should be flexible enough to allow for pen- and paper based methods and thus combine modern technical possibilities and more traditional approaches to the annotation of primary linguistic data.

We demonstrate how this is realized in ELAN. The integration of media and the flexibility of the annotation structure will be illustrated with examples from the DoBeS project. The possibility to generate different task-specific representations of the same annotation content is an important part of ELAN; the integrated viewers support the traditional (paper oriented) access but they offer also computer specific views.  This generation of tools does in no way constrain users to create annotation contents as they want them.

Meet the interface: inscribing community participation in language resource software development 

David Nathan

In this presentation I will show that the academic contribution to maintenance and revitalisation of endangered languages depends crucially on interfaces – in particular, the working interfaces between researchers and community, and the screen interfaces through which people conceive of and interact with digital resources.

Within IT-based activities, power relationships between participants are signified by the distribution of resources, and the results can be seen in levels of access and the amount and types of software and methodology development. I will survey the contemporary products created by linguists working with IT, to show that these products are heavily skewed toward two areas: drawing up standards for linguistic data encoding, and producing software for categorising, analysing, and retrieving linguistic data. While these serve traditional linguistic functions of description, analysis and archiving, they offer limited help to communities wishing to maintain, revive, or interact with their languages. Few community members are researchers or descriptive linguists, but many have robust interest in the state of their languages.

The presentation will draw from several CD-ROMs that I have produced in collaboration with endangered languages communities together with linguists. In each case, I will show how each community’s values, culture, and language situation has provided a specific and concrete influence on the type of software and its course of development. Innovative designs, algorithms, and interface metaphors are emergent products of collaboration: there are no hard and fast rules for determining the best underlying data formats, or screen designs, and some current ideas for the description of template presentation interfaces based on standardised metadata frameworks are destined to fail. Ultimately, the effectiveness of resources for language maintenance or revitalisation depends on the community’s embracement of them as a catalyst to rebuilding language competence. In producing rich, interactive multimedia resources, we provide not only significant lingustic and technical challenges, but also flexible resources for communities and platforms for community participation and motivation.

A Language Divided by an International Border: Problems of Documentation and Revitalisation

Evgeniy Golovko

The paper discusses the problem of documentation of a language spoken by people divided by an international border. I had an opportunity to deal with at least one such extreme case.

Ca. 300 Aleuts living today in the Commander Islands (Russia) and Kamchatka got there in several portions due to the activities of the Russian-American Company in the course of 19 century. They were resettled from the Aleutian Islands and Alaska (belong to USA since 1867) where ca. 1,800 Aleuts still reside today. While Aleut (there are two dialects) spoken in the USA by 340 elders is undoubtedly in an endangered position, the only Aleut dialect of the Commander Islands is very close to the so-called language death: there are no more than 3 to 5 speakers in the village of Nikolskoe.

In my presentation, I will focus on how, during my field work among the Commander Aleuts, I used (as one of stimulus for my assistants from the Native community) materials of two sorts: a) texts recorded among their 'distant relatives' in the Aleutians (hundreds of kilometers and one and a half century away); b) texts recorded on phonograph by Waldemar Jochelson early in 19 century. I will touch upon the problem of late (unadapted or partly adapted) borrowings and code-switching, "archaic" words and constructions kept by Commander Aleuts as a result of a certain "language conservation", innovations in the language of Aleutian Aleuts and the interpretation of these innovations by Commander Aleut speakers.

Another issue of great importance discussed in the paper is the problem of group identity as linked to language (dialect). Among the two Aleut varieties spoken in the Commander Islands (the second one is a contact language – Mednij Aleut), only one is identical with Aleutian Aleut. It caused a certain competitiveness among the speakers: those recognizing more tape recordings treated that fact in their favour claiming their dialect was "the most genuine one".

Another important effect of the use of tape recordings in the field work was a keen interest taken by all Commander Aleuts, including non-speakers, in the language of Aleutian Aleuts. Their enthusiasm to learn more about their 'distant relatives' and their hope to meet them in the future resulted in a logical suggestion to introduce an optional teaching of Aleut at junior school, compile a learners' dictionary (with parallel alphabets) and write a school grammar.

Implications of ethnographic techniques for anthropological and linguistic theory

Thomas Widlok

New modes of language documentation, as advocated by DoBeS, require and at the same time permit a greater role for ethnography in linguistic work. It is required because a more sustained language documentation has to go beyond data collection for narrowly defined linguistic interests. It is also facilitated through the employment of new technologies in particular high quality digital video. However, practicing ethnographic linguistics has more implications for anthropological and linguistic theory than may initially meet the eye and this paper explores some of these implications with reference to an interdisciplinary DoBeS research project carried out with =Akhoe Hai//om speakers in northern Namibia.

My empirical point of departure are the problems that linguists and anthropologists encounter when trying to “fix the meaning” of key terms used with reference to Khoisan ritual activities and experiences. For instance the “power” (n/um) that makes dancers fall into trance can also refer to such diverse things as herbal medicine, menstrual blood or the vapour trail of a jet-engine. Similarly, in =Akhoe Hai//om the trance dance is sometimes talked about as “play” (/huru), “medicine” (so/oan), “dance” (/gais) or “Elephant” (=khoab). Any disambiguation of these terms has proved very difficult. It is, for instance, by no means clear that talking of the trance dance as “play” is a metaphorical extension of playing games, the reverse could be true. The traditional, formalist, approach to this problem has been based on a rather strict separation between linguistic form and context and led to a collection of examples of the form being used in a variety of contexts. The collection would then be used in an attempt to pin down the “literal” meaning of a word or lexeme and its figurative or metaphorical uses. In the academic division of labour anthropologists were usually left the task to concentrate on metaphors and on lexemes that have no clear literal meaning.

The trouble with this approach, as W. Hanks has pointed out, is that it proves to be an impossible task and that it is ultimately self-defeating because context is inexhaustible and there is no way of knowing from the data when enough “applications” of a term have been collected to fix its “literal” or derived meaning. For dead languages with a clearly delimited corpus of recorded utterances the limit is fixed, but arbitrarily so through the coincidental ways in which the corpus has come into being. As for spoken languages the task is equally impossible because ever new contexts emerge and meanings shift all the time. Here the limit for appropriateness is fixed by the standards set by a particular theoretical paradigm. Documenting threatened languages potentially faces both these problems at the same time. It is therefore very unlikely that the established form-application paradigm can provide a documentation that remains open to changes in theoretical standards and to changes in language use. Ethnography provides a more promising solution to the problem in that it redefines the unit of speech production and analysis from that of individual speakers to that of the participatory framework in which speakers and listeners engage with one another. It replaces unlimited combinational capacity with limited practical feasibility since speakers - due to their position in ongoing social interaction and communication settings - do not have indefinite or equal access to speech resources but are restricted by the immediate situation, their social position and the overall conditions for interaction and communication. The ethnographic search for a disambiguation of a term such as n/um or /huru is not to distil a “true meaning” from an arbitrarily selected number of utterances but with regard to what is feasible for speakers in the establishment of shared meaning – and with considerable consequences for theory and the academic division of labour.

Whose document?

Felix K. Ameka

There are various stakeholders in the language documentation enterprise. Austin (2003:8) mentions the following key players: "Funding agency; Archiver; Research Team (including field linguists, anthropologists, ethno-historians, IT specialists etc.); Speaker community; Users; General public". Different types and different segments of each of these (and a couple more) stakeholders have their own vision and expectations about the documentation process. In this talk I want to reflect on the impact of the different agendas of these players on the shape of the record. Drawing on my personal experience with language description and documentation projects in West Africa, I will examine the challenges and consequences of situations in which members of the research team are also members of the speaker community and those in which the members of the research team do not belong to the speaker community but are nationals of the same country, and those in which they are 'outsiders'. In addition I will single out a key player in language documentation and promotion which has not been identified explicitly by Austin, namely governments, and I will discuss the effect of government policies on the nature of the record and its role in language maintenance.

Reference
Austin, Peter K. 2003. Introduction Language Documentation and Description 1: 6-14

 

Biri biri: Erasing the boundaries between linguist and language community through collaborative research in Nicaragua

 Elena Benedicto and team

In recent years there has been a shift of attention from merely preserving (a description of) endangered languages for scientific purposes, to the needs of the communities where those languages are spoken. A way of addressing those needs in a full fair way, while at the same time conducting linguistic research can be found in the methods of participatory action research.

The philosophy behind the projects we will talk about here is that of participatory research, where the members of the community become the agents of the research rather than the objects of study. This requires  the set up of a methodological  mechanism that includes (i) a decision making component (to collaboratively set up general objectives, specific goals, and the steps to accomplish those), (ii) an ongoing technical training mechanism (for the transfer of the ‘tools of the trade’: the development of observational and descriptive abilities as well as analytical skills), and (iii) an evaluation tool to self-assess the process along the way.

In this paper we will report on a series of projects currently under way in Nicaragua, more concretely in the Mayangna community of the Northern Atlantic Coast  (RAAN).

The authors of this paper have participated in a variety of responsibilities in the following three projects.

1. Women as Indigenous Linguists. This project was created with funding from Europe and it had as its goal the training in linguistic techniques of four women teachers of the Mayangna communities of Nicaragua, two of each dialectal variant (Tuahka and Panamahka). It produced a volume of Indigenous Women’s Stories, two Illustrated Dictionaries for Children and a substantial lexical database.
2. Tuyuwayaba. This project counts with 7 to 8 member of the minority dialect Tuahka. The group got formed to rescue their cultural heritage and to provide linguistic tools for the schools, such as vocabularies, etc… It is self-governing, establishing its own goals and means.
3. Indigenous Linguists Team. It counts with 6 members, who are training to become the linguistic group for the community, and the support team in linguistic matters to the Intercultural Bilingual Education Program in the area. The group is currently working on a bi-dialectal monolingual dictionary  including definitions in the Mayangna language.

The presentation will report on the organization of the groups, the internal dynamics of them and the consequences for the community.

The joint work of linguists, anthropologists, and native speakers on the Trumai language: developing documentation strategies

Aurore Monod Becquelin  / Raquel Guirardello-Damian / Emmanuel de Vienne

The goal of this presentation is to explore issues related to the documentation of endangered languages and to report our experience with the Trumai people, focusing on two main topics: (a) the necessity of an active collaboration between members of a speech community and the researchers who work with them, despite potentially slightly different goals, (b) the joint work between linguists and anthropologists.

The project on the Trumai language aims to organize a multimedia archive with materials that can be useful to both researchers and the native speakers. If we cannot prevent a language (or more accurately, the use of a language) from dying, we can at least respect the language by documenting it, that is to say to capture it in its practice and evolution, or in other words, in its culture and history. It is a truism to say that cooperation between speakers and researchers is essential, not only for enriching the work, but also for developing documentation strategies with regard to certain areas, such as:

(i) documenting knowledge that is "diffuse": myths and chants, taxonomies, and kinship terms constitute a visible and salient part of an indigenous Amazonian culture. However, there are other kinds of knowledge that are equally important, but difficult to document because no conventional format exists to present them in public. People learn such kinds of knowledge gradually, in different forms and from various sources; for instance, rules of social behavior, kinship relations, historical facts and alliances with other groups, etc. This type of shared knowledge is in a way "spread" throughout the community, and its documentation requires special strategies.

(ii) preparing a text for presenting it to a general audience: in an oral tradition culture, when a story-teller or a chanter delivers a performance, s/he addresses a very concrete audience, such as family members, friends or neighbors, etc. Not only is the audience defined, but also the environment where the performance is taking place (time, space, participants, local preoccupations ­— that is to say, historical and cultural context) and this always influences the performance itself, sometimes manifesting its effects even on syntactic rules (cf. Foley 1997). By contrast, the target-audience of a multimedia archive is abstract: not a particular individual, but a potential public; not only the users in present times, but future users as well. When we make a recording of an indigenous language for documentation purposes, we are actually recording a document that is highly contextualized; but when we include it in a multimedia archive, the audience and the context change. Therefore, it is necessary to compensate for this incongruity. The material must be prepared in such a way (with an adequate translation, with annotations, which means a careful description of the context and the cultural shifters of narration and dialogues) that it can be understood by various kinds of people, not only by the very specific public that was originally addressed.

We intend to discuss these points, illustrating them with examples from our own experience, such as the drastic change in the relations between Trumai speakers and researchers over the last forty years (the time period that project researchers have been dealing with this Amazonian group). We will also touch upon the partial change of point-of-view between the structuralist period and the flourishing of pragmatics with regard to collecting myths and oral tradition. Finally, we intend to address the issue of the joint work of linguists and anthropologists. When linguists study an endangered language, they tend to concentrate on the study of its grammar, and often leave the relationship between language and culture little explored, although it is now well known that pragmatics and discourse are part of grammar and that speaking is a culturally constructed activity. On the other hand, anthropologists are seldom aware that a neglected tiny morpheme can change the semantics of a whole narration (skipping from an epistemic mode to another, or even from a genre to another — e.g., from myth to history, which may distort the construed interpretation). To conduct a project in which linguists and anthropologists work in close and active collaboration is a good way of counteracting these problems. Cooperation during field work is especially important because ideas emerge not only when the data are analyzed, but on site as the research and the documentation work itself is being developed. Again, we illustrate this point with concrete instances from our project on Trumai.

Language documentation and maintenance in two indigenous communities of Argentina

Veronica Grondona

This paper discusses the documentation and language preservation work undertaken in two indigenous communities of the Chaco region in Argentina, focusing on the conflicts and compromises encountered in attempting to address jointly the goals of the linguist in documenting and describing the languages, and the goals of the communities in teaching and preserving not only the languages but also their culture. The paper focuses on two communities: the Mocoví community of “El Pastoril” (Chaco), and the multilingual community of Mission La Paz (Salta).

The Mocoví speakers live in communities scattered in the western region of Chaco province. Their language is endangered: in many of these communities children are no longer acquiring Mocoví as their first language. Mocoví was poorly documented until the 1990s, when I began documenting the language. This work also resulted in the establishment of a bilingual education program in “El Pastoril”, the largest Mocoví community of Chaco, where efforts are now under way to teach reading and writing in Mocoví at the local elementary school, and instructional materials are being developed, based on the documentation.

The second case, the community of Mission La Paz, in Eastern Salta, presents a unique multilingual situation with three indigenous languages: Chorote, Chulupí and Wichí, plus Spanish. Although there is material on Wichí, the three indigenous languages are poorly documented, especially Chorote and Chulupí. A project recently began to document and describe Chorote and Chulupí, and to produce language materials for the communities.

I will first describe the linguistic work undertaken in both projects with the purpose of documenting and describing the languages. I will then discuss the effects of professional involvement on both communities, focusing on the linguists’ contribution to language maintenance and revitalization: (i) the establishment of the bilingual education program for the Mocoví community in southern Chaco (the production of literacy materials in joint work by native speakers and the linguist; the institutional support the program has received; and what has been accomplished to date); and (ii) the production of Chorote language materials in Mission La Paz and plans for their utilization in the local school.  The considerable linguistic, ethical, and political challenges encountered in the process are discussed. Finally, the work lying ahead is outlined: training and support of native speakers of the indigenous languages, the general language maintenance and promotion work, and the activities to be undertaken for further documentation of the language.

Development of Khowar as literacy language: Results of interaction between linguists and speech community in Chitral, Northern Pakistan

Inayat Ullah Faizi

Speech communities among minority languages in South Asia generally live in a state of inferiority complex and believe that their language is a barrier in the way of their social advancement. Khowar, an Indo-Aryan language of the Dardic group spoken by a mountain community in the Hindu Kush-Karakorum tract of northern Pakistan, was facing the danger of extinction due to this mindset in the 20th century. 

 It was the interaction between linguists and the speech community, which raised awareness among the Kho people on the relevance and significance of their language and paved the way for its development as a literacy language. The story goes back to 1883, when George Grierson first made linguistic inquiries into the origin of Khowar. The findings of his research led to the first orthography for Khowar in Urdu script with six additional letters for those of its sounds, which do not exist in Urdu.  This was followed by Georg Morgenstierne beginning in the 1920s, Georg Buddruss beginning in the 1960s, Syed Azeem Shah Khiyal Bukhari 1963, David Munnings 1980-85 and Dr, Elena Bashir 1987-the present.

As a result of this interaction with researchers in linguistics, many people in the speech community such as Mirza Mohammad Ghufran, Narsirul Mulk, Hisammul Mulk, Wazir Ali Shah, Ghulam  Umar, Samsamul Mulk, Baba Ayub, Inayatullah Faizi and a  good number of other writers and intellectuals came to fore-front  as social mobilizers and advocates for  preservation and promotion of Khowar as a distinct  archaic language and mother tongue of a minority  community in a society that is highly prejudiced and  biased against such minorities. The movement has resulted, in the creation of an advocacy association, called the Anjuman-e- Taraqi Khowar, founded in 1957 and sustained to date with a core office and twelve branches in various pockets of the speech community. This group has emerged as a result of active cooperation between linguists and the speech community and it has so far published 43 books in Khowar.

 The paper elaborates the nature of the interaction between linguists/researchers and members of the speech community with special emphasis on the outcome and results of this active cooperation in chronological order. The paper also takes the power relationships; conflicts, compromises and innovative methodologies applied in particular cases into account. It also gives the author's implicit and explicit impression of the contribution of linguists in the promotion of a minority language.  

Documenting language and cultural practice:  Experiences with interdisciplinary research and community involvment in East Nepal

Novel Kishore Rai / Vishnu Singh Rai / Martin Gaenszle

Nepal is a multiethnic, multilingual country where 23 million people speak more  than 90 different languages. One of the remarkable aspects of linguistic diversity in Nepal is the distribution of languages over heterogeneous  geographical areas in the highlands and lowlands of the country. A large portion of population speaks a handful of Indo-European (14 in all) languages - above all Nepali, the national language -, whereas the greater number of Tibeto-Burman languages (more than 60) have relatively few speakers. Many of the  latter are highly endangered.

Our research focuses on Chintang and Puma, two little known Kiranti languages  in East Nepal. We found that the available information on the languages was in part highly misleading. E.g. Chintang was reported to be spoken in one ward of  Chintang Village Development Committee and ‘nowhere else’, and the ‘fluent speakers are supposed to be below 100’ (Hansson 1991:24, 25). However, the situation in the field turned out to be quite different. Firstly, the number of Chintang speakers is far more than just 100: it goes well beyond 1000. The speakers are spread in almost all wards of the VDC, and partially in some wards of another adjacent VDC. Secondly, Chintang people are also fluent in Bantawa and ethnic Bantawa in Chintang. In fact, they speak both languages equally well, unaware of the fact that they are bilinguals and trilinguals. Moreover, three different Kiranti languages (Chintang, Bantawa and Chiling) are spoken in a rather small area, a mountain ridge of around 25 km in length. Usually language areas in East Nepal are separated by some boundaries such as rivers and mountains, but there are no such boundaries here.

The paper will focus on our experience in documenting these language traditions  in an interdisciplinary manner, involving not only linguistic, but also anthropological approaches, as well as techniques for the study of language acquisition. In the present-day context of Nepal, in which a reassertive Hindu monarchy is under heavy public criticism from various sides, the documentation of a 'tribal' minority language can hardly be a politically completely neutral undertaking. Our paper - two of the speakers are from the larger ethnic group  itself - will include reflections on this aspect, on the general fieldwork situation,  and the collaboration with the local communities.

Literacy and orthography standardisation in Barupu

Miriam Corris

Orthography standardisation is usually seen as a necessary precursor to dictionary-making and the development of literacy in endangered languages. This paper focuses on a situation where people are already using written language effectively, and questions whether a current dictionary writing project (with a standardised orthography) could interrupt the development of literacy.

Barupu is spoken by about 2,000 people on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. Many speakers can read written Barupu, and many are confident in writing as well. Uses of written Barupu include signage, public notices and some personal correspondence. The current orthography is based largely on sound correspondences with Tok Pisin and English and is transferred through informal means. It shows systematic variation in five main areas:

1) Where there is no Tok Pisin sound equivalent.

2) Where English has different graphemes for the same sound.

3) Where there is no Tok Pisin or English sound equivalent.

4) Where the sound is a result of a phonological process.

5) Where there is socio-linguistic variation in the pronunciation of a word.

Up until the (community-driven) inception of the Barupu Dictionary Project in 2000, these variations apparently existed peacefully side by side. The creation of the dictionary, and associated literacy materials, seems to require that certain orthographic decisions be made but the decisions create problems for the producer. Not least among them is the question of who should decide. Some speakers see the linguist as the arbiter of spelling, while others believe that as a non-speaker the linguist is the least qualified. Many of the entries are written by speakers and so one possibility is to leave them as is. A problem arises in choosing how to spell headwords and definitions which have been collected in audio form. Another arises in committee-style proofreading sessions.

Because any decision about how to spell a word necessarily disenfranchises people who don’t spell it that way, a premature, ultimately arbitrary, decision could lead to two undesirable outcomes: 1) literacy becomes equated with correct spelling and a power differential is set up where some people are seen as holding the knowledge about how to write ‘correctly’ and others may feel less confident about writing and stop doing it; 2) people disagree with the dictionary and won’t use it, thus making all the work in producing it pointless.

Ideally then, dictionaries should admit variation, but problems are encountered here as well. For example, should words in definitions and example sentences be given with variant spellings, or only headwords? Is it possible to avoid giving one spelling primacy over another without the dictionary becoming unamanageably large? What difficulties are created in look-ups?

In this paper I discuss some attempts to reconcile these ideas and problems in the Barupu Dictionary Project.