Conference on Minority Language Documentation for Community Language Practitioners

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

The major centers of training for linguists are universities in the United States, Europe, Australia and Latin America. This creates a challenge for countries like Indonesia, which produce significantly fewer trained linguists, yet at least 700 of the estimated 7,000 languages of the world are spoken with its borders. One innovative, collaborative approach to addressing the training bottleneck in documenting endangered languages is the use of relatively short training workshops that bring together teams with different expertise. This workshop will use conduct a one-week language documentation conference that has the additional benefit of producing documentation on the languages. The focus will be on the endangered languages of Nusa Tenggara Timur, since speakers of these languages have little or no documentary expertise. The scientific interest of East Indonesian languages includes their relevance to the linguistic history of the region and further documentation and analysis of these languages will have broad implications for the study of two entirely different language families in this biogeographical transition zone between the Asian and Australian continents. U.S. graduate students will gain international field research and training experience, and minority language speakers will be trained in best practices in language documentation and archiving. There will be increased international collaboration opportunities. Project products include materials supporting language efforts in the communities and the deposit of documentation in the highly regarded PARADISEC archive will increase accessible data on the targeted languages. This conference focuses on training native speaker documenters, because they are often in a better position to conduct the tasks of documentation, from securing appropriate permissions to arranging recording sessions to transcribing and annotating texts. Languages from two entirely different language families, the Austronesian Central Malayo-Polynesian family, and the non-Austronesian Timor-Alor-Pantar, long assumed to be Trans-New Guinea languages of mainland New Guinea, will be documented during the workshop. Both families share a number of typological features which appear to have diffused across the families, most notably in the system of grammatical possession, both in constituent order and in overtly distinguishing between alienable and inalienable possession, features which are rare in the Austronesian family. On the other hand, the languages often distinguish inclusive vs. exclusive pronouns, a feature common among Austronesian language but rare in the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea. The training of endangered language speakers to produce, linguistically annotate, and archive quality data will lay the groundwork for further scientific investigation of these and other topics. The resulting documentation will increase scientific knowledge of Eastern Indonesian languages, while also laying the groundwork for future projects in this region, including possible collaborations between the two groups of participants, graduate students and native speaker documenters. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.