Interdisciplinary Approaches to Endangered Language Documentation

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This project organizes a speaker's series that will take place at the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC), to be held at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM) in late February of 2013. The speaker's series meets the need to share specific examples of exemplary interdisciplinary research in the field of language documentation with the conference attendees. Sometimes called "themed" documentation, this research approach exemplified by the speakers invites the layering of more than the one standard discipline within a given project. In this speaker's series, work in ethno-biology, spatial cognition, language acquisition and sociolinguistics are specifically addressed in relation to the documenting of endangered languages. As the speakers will attest, the emerging science of language documentation has evolved to be highly interdisciplinary and begs to be further defined by new methods that blend the contributing disciplines in intellectually interesting ways. The speaker's series builds on the conference theme of "Sharing our Knowledge" which was chosen to reflect this new interdisciplinary trend within the discipline of language documentation. This series of four targeted presentations, each involving a different sub-discipline, will fill a gap in the conference structure by providing current examples from expert researchers of ongoing interdisciplinary work within the field. By adding this to the conference, these examples will allow the broader conference audience, as well as workshop participants, to interact with researchers who are actively engaged interdisciplinary research. The resulting papers, to be submitted by the speakers, will form a special issue on interdisciplinary research within language documentation for the Journal of Language Documentation and Conservation in order to reach an even broader audience.