Endangered Languages and Cultures

Wilma Mankiller

5 February 201116 May 2010 by Jane Simpson

The Economist 24/4/2010 p.76 has a moving obituary for Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to be elected chief of the Cherokee Nation, and someone who did an extraordinary amount of practical good against extraordinary odds. She co-wrote Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women (2004) with Vine Deloria, Jr., and Gloria … Read more

NT Ex-Bilingual Schools

5 February 201113 May 2010 by Jane Simpson

UPDATE: check out Greg’s post on the new Crikey language blog Fully (sic) Greg Dickson has done a great service by looking at the figures on attendance rates in NT schools with large numbers of first language speakers of Indigenous languages – you can find his discussion on the Friends of Bilingual Learning website. One … Read more

Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities – Conference

5 February 201129 April 2010 by Jane Simpson

Language work has been one of the main areas in which Indigenous people and people working with them have used special purpose software, and have had to confront the problems of data management. There’s a call for papers for a conference, Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities, to be held at the Australian National University, 13-17 … Read more

Fieldwork training workshop in Manchester

5 February 201126 April 2010 by admin

The Institute for Linguistics and Language Studies (ILLS) at The University of Manchester and the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies are co-organising a fieldwork training workshop to be held in Manchester on 20th May. This event is aimed at both postgraduate students and lecturers with an interest in teaching field methods for … Read more

One missing slash equals an object lesson in keeping backups

5 February 201122 April 2010 by Aidan Wilson

This semester, I have been helping out Jane with her wonderful Field Methods class in technical matters such as recording, uploading files onto the server and allowing students to securely and quickly download both .wav and .mp3 files. I took this course myself some years ago, and it was a great experience for me and the whole class, and many members of that class have continued on in their studies to do field research of their own, and I’m sure the Field Methods class was as much a help to their research as it was to mine.
But this post is not about when I took the class. Instead, it’s about how I almost buggered up this semester’s class in what can best be described as a lesson in keeping backups of your recordings.
(Warning: Some computer nerd stuff follows after the fold.)

Doing Great Things with Small Languages

5 February 201121 April 2010 by Nick Thieberger

Doing Great Things with Small Languages is an ARC funded project run by Nick Thieberger and Rachel Nordlinger at the University of Melbourne.

Linguists routinely record minority endangered languages for which no prior documentation exists. This is vitally important work which often records language structures and knowledge of the culture and physical environment that would otherwise be lost. However, while it is typical for the interpretation and analysis of this data to be published, the raw data is rarely made available.
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Bienvnus a Dgernesi

5 February 201120 April 2010 by admin

As part of the MA in Language Documentation in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP) at SOAS, students are able to participate in a two-week fieldtrip to Guernsey, Channel Islands, to undertake first-hand fieldwork and document the local highly endangered indigenous language Dgernesiais (or Guernesiais). The fieldtrip is organised by Julia Sallabank, Lecturer in Language … Read more

How long is a piece of string?

5 February 201114 April 2010 by admin

Last month I received the following email query from a colleague:

“I am currently submitting a grant application for a small grant at the HRELP to document …. One concern I have is how many hours it will realistically take to transcribe one hour of text. I have done fieldwork in the past, but this would be the first time that I will have trained a transcriber who would work (mostly) independently. (The linguists on the project would consult with them.) I would like to give some sort of concrete number of total hours transcribed and translated (in contrast to fully annotated).”

Since this is an issue I have been asked about several times, I present here an elaborated version of what I wrote back to my correspondent (here I am using ‘source language’ to refer to the language of the recording, and ‘target language’ to refer to the language of a translation of the recording. I restrict my remarks to transcription of spoken languages).
I wrote back:
The answer to your questions is kind of like the answer to the question: ‘How long is a piece of string?’
There are so many variables:

LDD 7 now available

5 February 20117 April 2010 by admin

Now available! Language Documentation and Description Volume 7 was published on 26 March 2010, and is a special issue containing lectures on topics in language documentation and description from the 3L Summer School held at SOAS in 2009.

Dictionary survey – Endangered Languages and Dictionaries Project – Sarah Ogilvie

5 February 20113 April 2010 by Jane Simpson

[from Sarah Ogilvie] The Endangered Languages and Dictionaries Project at the University of Cambridge investigates ways of writing dictionaries that better facilitate the maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. It explores the relationship between documenting a language and sustaining it, and entails collaboration with linguists, dictionary-makers and educators, as well as members of endangered-language communities … Read more