ELDP grant application round open

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The 2011 grant application round for the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) at SOAS opened on 10th February. Applications close on 28th March 2011. Further information is available here. ELDP has made two changes to the application process this year: applications must be submitted through a new online application system (unless online access is difficult) … Read more

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Unveiling the new and improved ELAC

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Cross-posted from Transient Langauges and Cultures

This blog is now well into its fifth year and in all that time, not much has changed (apart from the new ‘look’ which was imposed on us from above). But a major development has now taken place: we have moved to a new home.

Regular readers will know that many contributors to this blog (such as Peter Austin, Jenny Green, David Nash among others) do so under Jane Simpson’s user account. This is because the blog’s user accounts are managed as part of the University of Sydney’s wider authentication system, meaning that only staff or students of the university could have an account.

Now, Jane Simpson has moved to the Australian National University, so we decided late last year to migrate the blog out of the confines of the Sydney University user authentication system and host it ourselves, on a server that PARADISEC won in 2008.

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LSA 2011 Sessions on Metadata in Language Documentation and Description

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At the recent annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Pittsburgh Jeff Good of University at Buffalo and I organised a tutorial session (Friday 7th January, 1.5 hours) and poster session (Sunday 9th January, 3 hours) on the topic of metadata in language documentation and description. The tutorial talks covered general topics such … Read more

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Small and strong

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Alongside all the talk about Last Speakers and loss of particular endangered languages, it is important to remember that not all the world’s minority languages are endangered. Languages can be small (having relatively few speakers) and yet be strong, in the sense that they are spoken by everyone in the community and show no signs of language shift or replacement by some other language.

A reminder of this came last month when Steven Bird sent a message to RNLD email discussion list asking:

Can anyone suggest the names of languages having small speaker populations that still have a good level of intergenerational transfer and good survival prospects?

This elicited a number of responses that identified small and strong languages in Africa, Brazil, and the Australia-Pacific region (probably reflecting more the readership of the RNLD list rather than anything particular about these regions). The full details are here (scroll down to topic 13), but I thought a short summary might be of interest to readers of this blog.

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Happy Anniversary

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of a symposium on “Endangered Languages and their Preservation” that was held on the 3rd January 1991 at the 65th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Chicago. The symposium was organised by the late Ken Hale and featured presentations by him, Michael Krauss, Lucille J. Watahomigie, Akira … Read more

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Endangered genres

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[ update 6/12/2010: some missing links now added ] It is by now well known that around half (or possibly more) of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered and under threat of disappearance during the current century. Perhaps less well known is that many languages that are not (yet) endangered show certain genres, or ways … Read more

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Free and open

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In commenting on a recent blog post of mine about SOAS publication plans, Nick Thieberger raises a number of relevant and important issues for anyone publishing in our field. Getting comments like this is manna to me as a blog author since so many of my posts go uncommented upon (I know people are reading them because I can track redirects from Facebook and my home page via bitly.com, and just occasionally someone references the content of a blog post, as in the recently published Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork by Shobhana L. Chelliah and William J. De Reuse). It is also good to be challenged to clarify one’s own thinking about issues, so thanks for the feedback, Nick.
I identified the following main four points in Nick’s comments:

  • 1. LDD should “move to an Open Access model for [its] content in the future”
  • 2. content should be free and online because that makes it available to people who cannot pay and who would otherwise not be able to access it
  • 3. having content online means you can measure downloads and the number of downloads measures impact
  • 4. the current LDD business model should be replaced

I will respond to each of these points in turn.

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Good on you LTU!

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I have a soft spot for La Trobe University (LTU) in Australia. LTU is where I got my first tenured job 30 years ago (just over two years after finishing my PhD — ah, those were the days) and still the place I have worked the longest in a somewhat peripatetic academic career (summarised here. … Read more

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SOAS publication plans

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This month the eighth volume of Language Documentation and Description (LDD8) hit the streets (you can order it at a 25% discount, and also get 25% off any of our other volumes ordered before 31 December 2010). It’s a special issue on documentation of endangered oral literatures and is guest edited by Imogen Gunn and … Read more

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