Language Documentation & Conservation 

About: Language Documentation & Conservation is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Language documentation & Documentation. It has an ISSN identifier of 1934-5275. Over the lifetime, 248 publications have been published receiving 2705 citations.

Research Models, Community Engagement, and Linguistic Fieldwork: Reflections on Working within Canadian Indigenous Communities

Abstract: This paper reflects on different research models in linguistic fieldwork and on different levels of engagement in and with language-speaking communities, focusing on the Canadian context. I begin by examining a linguist-focused model of research: this is language research conducted by linguists, for linguists; the language-speaking community’s participation is limited mostly to being the source of fluent speakers, and the level of engagement in the community by a linguist is relatively small. I then consider models that involve more engaged and collaborative research, and define the Community-Based Language Research model which allows for the production of knowledge on a language that is constructed for, with, and by community members, and that is therefore not primarily for or by linguists. In CBLR, linguists are actively engaged partners working collaboratively with language communities. Collaborative models of research seem to be closest in spirit to models advocated by Indigenous groups in Canada and elsewhere. I reflect here on (1) why one might choose to work within a collaborative research model, and (2) what some of the challenges are that linguists face when they conduct research collaboratively. In a broad sense the purpose of this paper is to think through some questions that an “outsider” linguist might face when undertaking linguistic research in an Indigenous community today.

Building the British Sign Language Corpus

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the British Sign Language Corpus Project – the first endeavor ever to create a machine-readable digital corpus of British Sign Language (BSL) collected from deaf signers across the United Kingdom. In the field of sign language studies, it represents a unique combination of methodology from variationist sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Unlike previous large-scale sign language sociolinguistic projects, the dataset is being annotated and tagged using ELAN software, given metadata descriptions, and the video data has been made accessible, with long-term efforts to make the dataset searchable on-line. This means, however, that participants must consent to having the video data of their sign language use made public. This puts at risk the authenticity of the linguistic data collected, as signers may monitor their production more carefully than usual. We discuss our attempt to minimise this problem by creating a dual-access archive.

The index of linguistic diversity: A new quantitative measure of trends in the status of the world's languages

Abstract: The Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD) is a new quantitative measure of trends in linguistic diversity. To derive the ILD we created a database of time-series data on language demographics, which we believe to be the world’s largest. So far, the database contains information from nine editions of Ethnologue and five other compendia of speaker numbers. The initial version of the ILD, which draws solely on the Ethnologue subset of these data, is based on a representative random sample of 1,500 of the world’s 7,299 languages (as listed in the 2005 edition). At the global level, the ILD measures how far, on average, the world’s languages deviate from a hypothetical situation of stability in which each language is neither increasing nor decreasing its share of the total population of the grouping. The ILD can also be used to assess trends at various subglobal groupings. Key findings: • Globally, linguistic diversity declined 20% over the period 1970–2005. • The diversity of the world’s indigenous languages declined 21%. • Regionally, indigenous linguistic diversity declined over 60% in the Americas, 30% in the Pacific (including Australia), and almost 20% in Africa.

Documentary Linguistics and Community Relations

Abstract: Not too long ago, I listened to parts of a radio series on science. An episode on physics, and the role of theory and empirical work in physics, particularly caught my attention. The speaker was arguing for the core nature of empirical work within physics, and the need to focus on empirical work over theory, broadly speaking, in order to make advances at this time. He argued that theoretical advances would occur only with advances in empirical research. This discussion about physics made me think about debates in linguistics over (at least) the last half-century around empirical research on languages. In linguistics, as in physics, there have been debates about the balance between theory and empirical work. In the world that I will characterize with the term fieldwork , with its focus on empirical work, the field of documentary linguistics has once again brought to the fore many of these controversies. Documentary linguistics has an empirical goal: focusing on the collection and archiving of data, with the development of principles relating to collection, archiving, and analysis of a diverse corpus. In documentary linguistics, like much work in science more generally, there are concerns about accountability and replicability. In these ways, documentary linguistics continues the tradition of regarding linguistics as a science, with a concentration on its empirical aspects. In documentary linguistics, the focus has been on data gathering and management over deep data analysis and description, at least for a point in time. See Himmelmann (1998, 2006), Austin (2010), and Woodbury (2003, 2011), among others, for detailed discussion of documentary linguistics. The person talking about physics on the radio program made no mention of another concern that is often associated with documentary linguistics—one that has also been an

Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation

Abstract: Language documentation is prototypically characterized as the collection of records of a language which can form the basis of traditional descriptive products such as lexicons, grammars, and texts (see, e.g., Himmelmann 1998:168–171). This follows from an emphasis by linguists and speaker communities on the so-called “ancestral code”—that is, the variety that is taken to be most representative of a given community’s traditions (Woodbury 2011). By comparison, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what kinds of documentary products are required to adequately capture sociolinguistic aspects of language use. This paper reports on the results of a workshop exploring theoretical and applied aspects of sociolinguistic language documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). SSA is special in being characterized by high rates of multilingualism and numerous vital “small” languages, where sociolinguistically informed approaches are likely to yield useful results for academic and speaker communities. More than sixty workshop participants, from Africa and elsewhere, organized into five working groups covering the following topics: conversational data and sociolinguistic documentation, documentation of culturally significant events, how languages acquire “value” in multilingual environments, social mechanisms fostering multilingualism, and documenting the relationship between language and culture. Among the conclusions of the working group discussions were: (i) the value of natural conversation as a way of documenting a language’s sociolinguistic setting and culture, (ii) the importance of documenting actual language use without distorting the data to make it better reflect notions of language purity (and other ideological positions), (iii) recommendations for expanded metadata collection about speakers and the recording context so that sociolinguistic configurations affecting data collection can be more adequately recorded, (iv) the necessity of establishing strong interdisciplinary partnerships when the goals of documentation go beyond structural aspects of grammar and basic lexical data, (v) that documentation including information on sociolinguistic context can usefully inform language planning decisions in ways that traditional documentation cannot, and (vi) the need for more flexible training opportunities than are presently available. A more general conclusion of the workshop was the importance of seeing more reflexive scholarship on the goals and practices of language documentation. This is crucial if we want to ensure that commonly employed idealizations such as “speaker community” do not inappropriately lead to documentary projects focusing on selections of speech events that are not an accurate reflection of the actual practices of those individuals whose speech is being documented.