As it approaches the halfway point, the 3L (Leiden-London-Lyon) Summer School on Language Documentation and Description is humming along. It started on Monday 23rd June and ends on Friday 4th July.
So far we have had five days of plenary lectures (in English) and discussions (in English, and French) on a range of topics, practical classes (on phonology, tonology, audio recording, Toolbox, multimedia, applying for research grants — most available in both English and French), and areal classes (on Cushitic, and Mayan languages). There is a full list [.pdf] of course descriptions on the 3L website. There are around 65 students and researchers attending from a wide range of countries as varied as Togo, Gabon, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Guatemala, USA, Netherlands, Germany, France, Russia, UK, Taiwan and Australia. Teachers are from the University of Lyon-2, SOAS and Leiden. The local organisational team is made up of students and staff from Lyon-2 together with student volunteers.
On Wednesday evening there was a very interesting soirée which brought researchers and students attending the 3L Summer School together with researchers and students attending a summer school on Interactional Linguistics being run by the CNRS ICAR laboratory headed by Professor Lorenza Mondada at the recently opened École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (with brand new architecturally outstanding buildings and facilities). There were many interesting issues of common interest that surfaced in the short presentations given by researchers from the two groups, including problems of fieldwork (entering, being in and leaving the field, the role of gatekeepers and brokers), research methods and tools, and giving back to those participating in the research. There are sure to be more useful interactions between the ICAR and DDL research groups in Lyon in the future.
Today there is a student conference, or rather two conferences since there will be presentations of around 20 papers in two parallel sessions, one in French and one in English. The students are so keen to discuss their work that the programme starts at 9:30am and goes to 7pm (on a Saturday, mind you!). This level of enthusiasm and willingness to share ideas and experiences has been a feature of the past week both in class and outside.
Some other features of the summer school so far that I have noticed include:
Follow1000 Languages
I just received copies from the publishers of a new book that may be of interest to readers of this blog. It is called 1000 Languages: The Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues and is edited by yours truly. The book was published by Thames and Hudson in the UK and associated countries, and by University of California Press in the US. It is available on UK Amazon, or readers in the UK can get it for an even cheaper price via the Tesco on-line store.
The book is issued in hard cover and runs to over 300 pages and includes over 400 colour illustrations, a series of maps, a glossary of linguistic terms, and a list of references. It is organised topically by geographical regions and each chapter explores the sources, interrelationships and characteristics of that region’s languages, including the major and minor ones of the area. It includes chapters on the topical issues of endangered and extinct languages. Each main entry details numbers of speakers, geographical spread, growth, development and key features of the language. The following is a list of the chapters and authors:
Coming down from the OzCLO State round
In the flurry of exam marking and LingFest preparation, the top floor of the Transient is still coming down from the ascent of 64 high school students today. They came from as far away as Camden (Macarthur Anglican), and James Ruse, to as close as Fort Street and St Marys in Sydney proper. Year 9, … Read more
Ways to deserts
Two great supporters of Australian Indigenous language work died recently. Dr R. Marika was widely known and well-respected for her passionate advocacy for Yolngu languages, and the importance of maintaining them and using them in schools. She was only 49. Short obituaries are on the web from ANTar, and The Australian.
J. Jampin Jones died yesterday. In 1998, as a middle-aged man, after many years of hard manual work, and in the midst of the grief and the havoc wrought by kidney failure on many of his family, he went to Batchelor College to learn to read and write Warumungu. An astonishing thing to do, and his charm, enthusiasm, and undauntedness gave hope and encouragement to other Warumungu students. Those of us studying Warumungu were helped immensely by his gift for explaining meanings, and by his belief that it was a good thing we were doing together.
We honour them both.
LingFest – time to register!
LingFest HQ (aka Transient Building) is stacked with boxes of large blue bags paid for by publishers in return for inserting flyers (that’s why the bags are so large). You could probably eat the bags, they’re so enviro-friendly. 30 keen student volunteers are zooming around in between (we/they hope) doing brilliantly on their exams, (they have set up a Googlegroups for coordinating volunteers with an online spreadsheet and forms that beat hands-down our Open Conference Systems/Events Pro conference site (I like the idea of OCS, I liked the old version (used in the Papuan Languages workshop successfully), but the implementation of this one at the hands of an inexperienced central IT crew…, sigh and super sigh). And the organising committee is pondering deep questions such as – is it possible to have a book launch without alcohol? (Answer: of course not – this is Australia, we Don’t DO teetotalism).
The program for the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (Marshallese, Malagasy, Indonesian, Seediq, Samoan…and more), is here.. The program for the Papuan languages workshop is here (One, Fas, Oksapmin…). The program for the International Lexical Functional Grammar Conference is here (Gunwinyguan, Turkish, Sinhala, Welsh..). Other programs include those for the Australian Linguistics Society [.pdf], and for the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia [.xls].
You can find out all about the units on offer for the Australian Linguistics Institute here [.pdf]. Units of particular interest to Transient Languages readers include:
Volunteer work in Vanuatu – Jeremy Hammond
[from Jeremy Hammond, who’s writing a grammar of Whitesands]
I was standing at the airport on Sunday night as you do, when I bumped into the director of Ausaid services in Vanuatu. One of the big things that they are doing this year is allowing volunteers to go and stay for long periods on outer islands. For linguists this means access to remote communities and languages that have had little work done on them.
Having just come back from living on an outer Island in Vanuatu I can strongly recommend going there to do work. Plenty of pluses; it is close and accessible to Australia/NZ so you will get plenty of visitors (if you want), the people are super friendly and the environment (outside of Vila) is not yet spoiled.
Languages there are changing very quickly (like elsewhere) but the kids still mainly learn a vernacular until about 5 years old and in general there is a strong attachment to their language, identity and culture. But change can happen quickly and who wants to lose more indigenous knowledge.
Anyway I was alerted to this position at the Malakula Kaljorol Senta (MKS) , who are looking for a resident cultural officer to particularly look after vernacular development (for 2 years).
Review: Duchêne & Heller: Discourses of Endangerment – by Nick Thieberger
Alexandre Duchêne & Monica Heller. 2007. Discourses of Endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum.
Reviewed by Nick Thieberger, University of Melbourne / University of Hawai’i
This collection of thirteen papers addresses language ideology, in particular the use of ‘language endangerment’ as a rallying cry with broader ‘ideological struggles on the terrain of language’. If I could have done a concordance of the text, I’m sure that tokens including ‘discourse’ and ‘essentialize’ would have come out near the top of the frequency list. The use of the former is apparently necessary at least once a page (and preferably more often) and the second is a ‘Bad Thing’, although I have to say that most authors in this book essentialize linguists and the linguistic project as unproblematic, and not internally fraught in the way that everything else is (although the naivete of this postmodern critique would have one think that only they could consider such a thing to be possible).
Deconstruction is the trope of choice throughout this volume – unfortunately constructive critique is not. A certain amount of critical evaluation of linguists’ engagement with endangered languages is necessary, but I find it in general to be dealt with in a heavy-handed and unhelpful way by many of the contributions to this volume.
In this review I will give a brief sketch of the contents of the book which I approached eagerly, keen to read a critical account of the endangered languages (EL) movement in which I have had some interest over almost three decades now. My interest in ELs has focussed on small languages, typically spoken by marginalised groups in what used to be called the fourth world, pre-industrial people living largely traditional lives and, in general these language were not provided with much in the way of resources or existing documentation. This book, on the whole, deals with languages ranging from Corsican to French as endangered in some way and it takes some changing gear in my mind to sympathise with their plight. One chapter deals with indigenous languages (of Canada) but otherwise the volume has a strong European focus (the other exceptions being a chapter on the ‘Official English’ movement in the USA and another on Acadian French in Nova Scotia).
And now we are five
As I pointed out in a previous post, there have been a lot of new developments in the field of endangered languages research in the past five years. One of those has been the publication series Language Documentation and Description which we produce annually at SOAS. We started the series in 2003 with the launch of HRELP, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (in fact, the first volume contains papers from our launch event and the workshop that followed). Hot off the presses this week is the fifth volume of papers, containing six papers on three topics: data and language documentation, digital video and archiving in language documentation, and training and activism in documentary linguistics. Here is the table of contents (for more details including a downloadable PDF of my Editor’s Preface and an order form go here):
All the news that’s fit to print
The May Newsletter of the Australian Linguistic Society has just come out and can be viewed here. As usual it includes information about conferences, workshops, research grants awarded to members, recent publications, and the odd flashback to ALS doings of the last century. Then there is the “News from …” section where stories submitted by Linguistics Departments around Australia are presented; the May edition includes Macquarie University, University of New England, Australian National University, and the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University.
Things move fast
Things move fast in the endangered languages world. Five years is a long time, especially the past five years when so much has happened. Last speakers of languages have passed away, such as the late Marie Smith Jones who was the last speaker of Eyak and who died on 21st January 2008 (her death garnered much publicity as signalling the first native Alaskan language to become extinct — a Google search of “last speaker of Eyak”, for example, returns 537 hits, led by such big names as the BBC, the Economist and so on). Other less publicised losses have occurred, such as Jawoyn from the Northern Territory, whose last fluent speaker died in July 2007.
But really good stuff has happened in the last five years too: millions of dollars of research funds have been made available for work with endangered languages through the Volkswagen Foundation’s DoBeS project, the NSF-NEH DEL scheme, and the ELDP grants administered by SOAS. There have been lots of grass roots activities to document, archive and support endangered languages, and a whole new group of committed students have entered the field via training programmes at ELAP at SOAS and University of Hawaii, among others. There have been summer schools, like the 2004 DoBeS summer school in Frankfurt, with more on the way including the 3L summer school and InField summer institute starting in June this year. If you add in the conferences, workshops, training courses, books, articles, media coverage, blogs and so on it is pretty clear that endangered languages has become a really hot issue, especially since 2003 or so.
Courtesy of the KITLV Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies I have just received a copy of Encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages edited by Christopher Moseley and started dipping into it. I am writing a proper review of the book for the BKI Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, but thought I would share some initial impressions here.