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.
FollowSmall languages kinda flourishing
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.
More threatened losses
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
Snowflakes – Indigenous place-names
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.
It’s only natural
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
Indigenous education in the NT – 2010 style
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
Hugo Schuchardt Archiv
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
Another life gone – wiyarrpa
It was sad and moving to read in the Tennant and District Times (Vol.33 No. 26 23 July 2010 p.8), of the tribute concert for the Alekarenge/Ali Curung singer and songmaker, B. Murphy of Band Nomadic, who recently died in Adelaide. Too young. Their most recent album Freedom Road [1] has been shortlisted for the … Read more
How much room is there in the arc(hive)?
Forty-five years ago the annual fieldwork reports of some of the researchers funded by the then Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now AIATSIS) included specifications of how much research had been completed in terms of the number of feet of tapes that had been recorded during the project year (“this year was especially productive with 45 feet 3 inches of tape being recorded”). The modern measure of this kind of quantitative nonsense is the number of gigabytes of digital files (soon to be terabytes) created by the researcher. Don’t mind the quality, it’s the length/bytes that count.
My colleague David Nathan, Director of the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS, has been approached on several occasions by researchers (both those funded by ELDP and those not (yet)) asking how much data they would be allowed to deposit in the archive. “Would it be OK if I deposit 500 gigabytes of data?” they ask. When you think about it for a moment or two, this is a truly odd request, but one driven by part of what David (in Nathan 2004, see also Dobrin, Austin and Nathan 2007, 2009) has termed “archivism”. This is the tendency for researchers to think that an archive should determine their project outcomes. Parameters stated in terms of audio resolution and sampling rate, file format, and encoding standards take the place of discussions of documentation hypotheses, goals, or methods that are aligned with a project’s actual needs and intentions. David’s response to such a question is usually: if the material to be deposited is “good quality” (stated in terms of some parameters (not volume!) established by the project in discussion with ELAR) then the archive will be interested in taking it.
Another quantity that comes up in this context (and in the context of grant applications as well) is the statement that “10% of the deposited archival data will be analysed”. The remainder of the archive deposit will be, in the worst case, a bunch of media files, or in the best case, media files plus transcription (and/or translation). Where does this magical 10% come from? It seems to have originated around 10 years ago with the DOBES project which established a set of guidelines for language documentation during its pilot phase in 2000. As Wittenburg and Mosel (2004:1) state:
“During a pilot year intensive discussions … took place amongst the participants. The participants agreed upon a number of basic guidelines for language documentation projects. … For some material a deep linguistic analysis should be provided such that later researchers will be able to reconstruct the (grammar of the) language”
Similarly, the guidelines for ELDP grant applications (downloadable here) include the following:
“Note that audio and video are not usable, accessible or archivable without accompanying textual materials such as transcription, annotation, or notes about content and participants. While you are encouraged to transcribe and annotate as much of the material as possible, we recognise that this is very time-consuming and you may not be able to do this for all recorded materials. However, you must provide some text indication of the content of all recordings. This does not have to be the linguistic content and could include, for example, description of the topics or events (e.g. names of songs), or names of participants, preferably with time alignment (indication of where they occur in the recording).”
No actual figure is given of how much “some material” (for DOBES) or “as much of the material as possible” (for ELDP) amounts to. In earlier published versions of advice to applicants both DOBES and ELDP did mention 10%.
Interestingly, Wittenburg (2009, slide 34) has done an analysis of the language documentation data collected by DOBES projects between 2000 and 2009, and he notes that the average project team has recorded 131 hours of media (59 hours of audio, 72 hours of video), transcribed 50 hours of this, and translated 29 hours. Linguistic analysis on average exists for 14 hours of recordings — strikingly this is exactly 10.68% of the average corpus!!
How 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? Well, it depends on a range of factors, including the nature of the language(s) being documented. Some Austronesian languages, like Sasak or Toratan, have relatively little morphology with pretty straightforward morpho-phonemics of such morphology that does exist, and so a relatively small amount of morpheme-by-morpheme glossed materials in conjunction with a lexicon would enable users to bootstrap the morphological analysis of other parts of a transcribed corpus in those languages. Other languages, like Athapaskan tongues with their fiendishly complex verb morphology, might need more annotated data to help the user deal with the whole corpus.
This is however an empirical question, and one that to my knowledge has not been addressed so far. There are now a number of documentary corpora available, with more coming on stream, and it should be possible to establish whether the “magical 10%” is a real goal to be aimed for, or just a figure that researchers have created and continue to repeat to one another.
Book launch for new grammar of Australian language
Another grammar of an Australian language is to be launched: Amanda Lissarague’s grammar and dictionary of Gathang (see 2008 blog-post on launch of other books published by the ever-productive Muurrbay and Many Rivers Language Centre).