EAGER: Collaborative Approach to the Documentation of Endangered Languages in Linguistically Diverse Locales

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

There are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world, and half of those not expected to survive into the next century. One challenge this presents is the urgent need to document languages in places where local people are shifting to national or other languages. Another challenge is finding sufficient number of trained documenters, especially in places that have many local and regional languages. As a result, there are many languages that have not been documented and whose survival is threatened. This constitutes a serious potential problem for the scientific study of the range of variation found in human language. This project will capitalize on a region where many young, educated people are taking a greater interest in their local and regional languages, and have the potential to play a major role in documenting these languages. It will increase the human resources side of this documentation bottleneck by partnering local citizen scientists who are not professional linguists or documenters of language with graduate linguistics students. Investing in the human capital takes the risk that this approach is depending on continued interest after the project in documenting these endangered languages. If this investment is successful, it could have a major impact on scientific knowledge for an area with 10% of the world's languages. Broader impacts include international research and training for graduate students, increased attention to endangered local languages, and the training of citizen scientists who participate in the production of knowledge. This project, led by a team of linguists from the University of Delaware and partner linguists in Indonesia and Japan will test out a new way to increase the involvement of young Indonesians in the documentation of their languages by creating teams of Indonesians (who are native speakers of these endangered languages) and American graduate students who hope to specialize in language documentation. Aside from the national language, Indonesian, linguists have only just begun the task of documenting Indonesian languages (recording an annotated sample and describing the language). Indonesia is estimated to have 719 or more languages, and east Indonesia is particularly rich with undocumented languages. The American and Indonesian members of the teams differ in terms of their strengths in the skills relevant to language documentation, the Indonesians having much stronger language skills and an understanding of the cultural context, and the Americans having greater technical training in linguistics and language documentation. By combining Americans and Indonesians in teams, it is hoped that the team will combine the strengths of the two groups, and, thus, will be much more successful in language documentation than either group could be individually. The project will provide field experiences in East Indonesia for two groups of American/Indonesian teams in two successive years. If this methodology does in fact seriously increase productivity and quality of documentation, it may constitute a new model for language documentation that can be applied with success to other parts of the world. Project materials will be archived at PARADISEC.