Endangered Languages and Language Documentation
Peter K. Austin
E-mail:
"'pa2@soas.ac.uk'" <pa2@soas.ac.uk>
Postal Address:
Endangered Languages Academic Programme
Department of Linguistics, SOAS
Homepage:
http://www.hrelp.org/aboutus/staff/index.php?cd=pa
This course will give an overview of language endangerment and the theory and practice of language documentation. The course will discuss what it means for a language to be endangered, where endangered languages are spoken, why they are endangered, and what can be done about the situation. We will explore the newly emerging sub-discipline of documentary linguistics that is “concerned with the methods, tools, and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties” (Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel 2006:v, see also Himmelmann 1998, 2006, Woodbury 2003), often contrasted with descriptive linguistics that concerns itself with abstract systems and the production of grammars, dictionaries and text collections. We will explore language documentation research methods, and introduce some of the hardware and software tools that can be used in corpus creation, typically through data collection in the field. There will be discussion of good practices in data recording, representation and analysis, along with archiving and mobilisation (publication and distribution of research outcomes in various multimedia formats). We will end with some outstanding issues facing the new sub-discipline, including challenges of interdisciplinarity, comprehensiveness and quality of research, archivism, language revitalisation, and ethical and moral concerns about intellectual property rights and what it means to be ‘a good linguist’.
Monday:
Overview of language endangerment
Tuesday:
Overview of documentary linguistics
Wednesday:
Good practices in language documentation
Thursday:
Tools and research methods
Friday:
Outcomes, issues and challenges
Background and preparatory readings:
Course readings:
Students should purchase Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus
Himmelmann and Ulrike Mosel (eds.) Fundamentals of Language Documentation.
Berlin: Mouton.
A CD of other significant papers and readings will be provided.
Further readings:
Abley, Mark 2003 Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages. New
York: Heinemann
Crystal, David 2000 Language Death. Cambridge: CUP
Himmelmann, Nikolaus 1998 Documentary and descriptive linguistics
Linguistics 36:161-195.
Nettle, Daniel and Suzanne Romaine 2000
Vanishing Voices.
Oxford: OUP