Small languages flourishing (2) – Íslenska

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Ísland: Iceland
Population: around 313,000

For the traveller to Iceland, the first sign of clever marketing of Íslenska (we speak English but think about what else we speak!) is in the Icelandair aeroplane, in which Icelandic is used for

  • announcements
  • briefing cards
  • on the seat antimacassars, Icelandic phrases and commentary e.g. on the ‘soft and cuddly sound’ of Góða nótt ‘good night’ [check the cuddly claim here].
  • and on the paper cups, 14 words for drinking vessels

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[ Photo courtesy of David Nash]

Surely the smallest language group to have its own airline.

In Reykjavík, there are plenty of signs of belief in the power of writing. Despite its location on the route between several big English-speaking countries, it has managed to resist much of the pressure to advertise in English and have signs in English. For print-addicts, the city language-scape is a treasure-house – vocabulary is reinforced by seeing words in other languages in signs and notices both public (roads, schools, monuments) and private (shop and business names and windows, advertisements, churches, graveyards). And hey! vanity plates using Icelandic diacritics [Gróa was a witch healer in Norse mythology].

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[ Photo courtesy of David Nash]

Cyber-space is also sparkling with .is pages in Icelandic for enterprises, commerical, public and sociable – even the knit cafes get mentioned.. (see Handprjónasamband Íslands (the Hand-knitting association of Iceland). BUT the website for the parent airline group appears in English and doesn’t advertise an Icelandic alternative. Uhuh. Commercial decisions are probably the coal-mine canaries for language health.

We went into several bookshops (Eymundsson and Mál og Menning) with cafés. It is impressive how much is written in Icelandic, and how much is translated (check out Forlagið). It’s wide-ranging – from Richard Dawkins on God (a big display) to translations of Finn Family Moomintroll, Astrid Lindgren and Harry Potter, to Bill Bryson, to a whole heap of airport reads (John Grisham, Jodie Picoult, Charlaine Harris). All this with a small population, and having to import paper.

All of this must be helping standardise ways of talking about new ideas, so expanding the domains in which it is easy to talk Icelandic. The Berlitz guidebook to Reykjavík shamed its parent company by sniffily commenting on the Icelanders’ ‘pedantic’ habit of compounding Icelandic roots to form words for new concepts. But does that reflect the views of outsiders complaining about Icelanders not using loanwords, or the frustration of some at the language purism of others? Anyway I am sorry now that I didn’t check how ‘vampire’ was translated, let alone ‘true blood’.

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Psst, want some data?

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Last month I wrote a blog post about quantification in language documentation and “[h]ow much of the corpus needs to be linguistically annotated so that ‘later researchers will be able to reconstruct the (grammar of the) language’ or indeed so that the rest of the corpus can be parsed”. Note that I was talking about linguistic annotation (not just transcription) here, but in his very useful comments on my post, James Crippen wrote:

“Some folks I know have well over 1000 hours of recorded material, and I think nowhere near ten percent of that has been transcribed. Asking for someone to do the ten percent for this before being willing to accept it is a bit unreasonable.”

Well, the first thing I have to say is: 1000 hours is an awful lot of recordings. It’s about 7.5 times the average DoBeS corpus (based on the figure I mentioned in my previous post) and if it’s video it’s equivalent to around 550 feature length movies (which average around 110 minutes each). If you spent every waking hour of the working week, with no time for eating, bathing, shopping, checking e-mail etc, it would take you six and a half months to merely watch or listen to it all, let alone create any metadata, analysis, transcription, or index (and remember that this is probably going to be in a language you don’t understand and with no subtitles). You’d want to have a good reason to do so, I reckon.
Anyway, be that as it may, James’ comment prompted me to seek some empirical data about this issue, so I wrote to five colleagues who are responsible for archives of materials on endangered languages, namely Peter Wittenburg of the DoBeS archive, Heidi Johnson of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America AILLA, Gary Holton of the Alaska Native Language Archive ANLA, Nick Thieberger of the Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures PARADISEC, and David Nathan of the Endangered Languages Archive ELAR at SOAS. I asked them the following questions:

“If someone approached you about depositing 1000 hours of recorded digital data on some language, less than 10% of which was transcribed, what advice would you (Archive_Name) give them? What would be the minimal requirements that you would have in order to accept the materials for deposit?”

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Where does the dosh go?

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About 18 months ago I wrote a blog post about potential sources of funding for endangered languages research. I identified three main types of funders: governmental grant bodies, non-governmental grant bodies, and endangered languages grant bodies. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), which is a sister to the Academic Programme (ELAP) and the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS, is one of the largest in the last category, distributing around GBP 1million per year in competitive grants.
As part of my current interest in meta-documentation, that is the documentation of language documentation (see this recent conference abstract, and a differently focussed workshop abstract [.pdf]), I have been looking at how granting agencies, and ELDP in particular, spend their funds. Where is funded research being carried out and where is the money being allocated to? Are there any changes over time that can be observed?
I chose to look at ELDP because it has global coverage in terms of the research areas it is interested in and in terms of which researchers it is prepared to fund. It also publishes information about the grantees and the size of the grants awarded, so data collection is easy. Volkswagen Foundation, in contrast, requires a German component in their DoBeS projects, while NSF-NEH Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) grants are restricted to US Institutions.
I wish to make it clear that although ELDP is administered by SOAS staff, its grant decision making processes are entirely independent of SOAS and are carried out by an International Panel chaired by Andrew Spencer of the University of Essex. The opinions I am expressing here are also independent of ELDP itself.

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Small languages kinda flourishing

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This post began in the auditorium of Diehtosiida, the new, beautiful and ultra well-equipped building in Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino, Norway, which houses Sámi allaskuvla, the Sámi University College, as well as other Sámi institutions, including Gáldu, the Resource Centre for Rights of Indigenous Peoples. As we entered the auditorium for the first Indigenous Placenames Conference, we encountered a rack of Bosch handsets and headsets for simultaneous interpreting, and this was offered in Sámi, Russian and English. And they weren’t for show – most introductions and some papers were given in (Northern) Sámi. Sámi people who spoke near-native English could, and did, give their papers in Sámi. Interpreters are at hand because of the Sámi University College – but because Diehtosiida houses other institutions, this probably increases the uptake on using interpreters, which in turn reduces the pressure to switch to a more dominant language, and widens the domains of use of Sámi.

Way to go! Where would we find that in Australia? Ah, but the price of the people and the equipment! Not even on offer at Trinity St David, the otherwise well-equipped and strongly Welsh branch of the University of Wales where the Foundation for Endangered Languages has just held its annual conference. Around 20,000 (?euros – Irish pounds thanks Peter!) for 3 days of simultaneous interpreting at a conference in Galway, said an Irish linguist. That’s the financial pressure that forces speakers of small languages to give their papers in a lingua franca. But… at the FEL conference I learned from a representative of the Mentrau Iaith (Welsh Language Initiatives) that schools and community meetings can rent the equipment cheaply, and that often a bilingual parent or community member does the interpreting. They do it because they want to be able to use the minority language freely, not because they couldn’t conduct the meeting in English. So it isn’t best practice interpreting – but it is a choice between this and nothing – and nothing inevitably means using the dominant language.

Two important ideas came up at the FEL conference: the tipping point when bilingual speakers move to the majority language, and the conflict between authenticity and creativity.

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More threatened losses

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Niue And Cook Island Māori Languages Threatened So runs the headline in Voxy, reporting the work of John McCaffery and Judy Taligalu McFall-McCaffery of the University of Auckland. “Our research indicates that Pacific Island languages in New Zealand show significant signs of language shift and loss, with several languages, especially Cook Island Māori and Niue … Read more

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Snowflakes – Indigenous place-names

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Last week in Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino, Norway, at the Sámi allaskuvla, the Sámi University College, was the first International Conference on Indigenous Place Names – “Exploring ways to reclaim cultural identity through place names” , beautifully, minutely and intricately organised by Kaisa Rautio Helander. The name ‘Guovdageaidnu/KautoKeino’ illustrates the range of the topic:

  • meaning: in Sámi Guovda ‘what is in between’, Geaidnu ‘road’; in Norwegian, Kautokeino is a name only
  • layering: Kautokeino is the Finnish spelling, now adopted by Norwegians
  • official naming policy: which name to use officially, which name comes first on road-signs

In the spring, a single snowflake melts, joins other snowflakes, becomes a trickle, a stream, a river, a sea – this metaphor with many interpretations is the heart of a poem by an early twentieth century Sámi writer, Pedar Jalvi which Kaisa recited at the start of the conference. You could use it for place-names – one Indigenous place-name on a map doesn’t convincingly show prior occupation/ownership, but thousands do. Or you could take it for this first conference itself – a river of understanding formed from trickles of people from different places – Māori, Zulu, Xaayda Gwaay.yaay (Haida Gwaii), Masai, Shipibo-Konibo, and particularly the Arctic (Sámi, Inuit, Nenets and Veps). They all have reasons to be passionately concerned about the nature, recognition and transmission of place-names.

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It’s only natural

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During a recent vacation I took the opportunity to re-read Stephen Jay Gould’s excellent collection of essays The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History” (published by Viking in 2001, the year before Gould’s untimely death). In his essay “A Tale of Two Work Sites” Gould reminds us (page 257) that it was … Read more

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Indigenous education in the NT – 2010 style

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If you are interested in Indigenous education in Australia or what happens when Governments get worried about minority groups not reading and writing the dominant language, check out Prioritising Literacy and Numeracy: A strategy to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes 2010-2012. Darwin: Northern Territory Government Department of Education and Training. There are some good things in it, but there are some worrying things. Take this paragraph:
“The language and cognitive skills domain includes basic literacy; basic numeracy; interest in literacy, numeracy and memory; and advanced literacy. The percentage of Northern Territory children vulnerable and at risk in the Language and cognitive skills domain at the commencement of full-time schooling is significantly greater than the national average, as indicated below.” (p.6)
Now it may be that the NT has lots of children from all backgrounds who are at risk. But I bet this is code for “Indigenous children”. Looking further – what is literacy? Literacy=English literacy. How are the cognitive skills tested? Almost certainly in English. This calls into question the reliability of the information on which this claim is made.
A lot of people in the NT are worried about the NT Government’s approach to Indigenous education – Australian Society for Indigenous Languages (AuSIL) , Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, NT branch (ATESOL NT) , Uniting Church in Australia, Northern Synod, Darwin Anglican Church of Australia, Diocese of the Northern Territory, Darwin and the Top End Linguistics Circle (TELC). They’ve got together to sponsor a seminar. So, if you’re in Darwin on Thursday 9 September, hop along to Indigenous languages in education Do current policies match our needs?
7:30pm, Thursday, 9 September 2010
Mal Nairn Auditorium,
Charles Darwin University,
Casuarina Campus
Contact: Phil Glasgow, 8931-3133

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Hugo Schuchardt Archiv

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I’ve been meaning to express my love and gratitude for the excellent Hugo Schuchardt Archiv at the Uni Graz for a while now. I was thinking of maybe saying a little something about Schuchardt for his birthday or Todestag, but the dates passed and in any case I come to exhume Schurchardt, not to praise … Read more

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