Endangered Languages and Cultures

So where do you get the dosh from?

5 February 20117 March 2008 by admin

On 28th and 29th February 2008 the CASTL,The Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics, at the Universitetet i Tromsø organised a Workshop om dokumentasjon og revitalisering av samiske språk “Workshop on documentation and revitalisation of Saami languages”. The workshop was attended by 52 people from nine countries, including Canada, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Russia, and all the Nordic countries, and brought together researchers and Saami scholars to create a network to support current and future work on documentation and revitalisation of all varieties of Saami.
I was invited to the workshop to talk about HRELP, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, including the training, archiving and granting work that the three components of HRELP are concerned with. Following my presentation, and in the general discussion session on Friday afternoon, there was a great deal of talk about how to apply for funds to support endangered languages work and to set up research networks (a topic also covered in the Training Course David Nathan and I ran in Japan that I blogged about here).
There are three main competitive funding sources that researchers and communities can apply to for funding:

General research grant bodies for the Humanities and Social Sciences set up by governments, such as the UK AHRC and SSRC, Australian ARC, Norwegian Forskingsrådet, German DFG and so on;
Non-government grant bodies such as Unesco, the Christensen Fund, the Endangered Archives Programme sponsored by Arcadia and managed by the British Library (this funds archival work which can include endangered languages materials)
and so on;
Endangered languages grant bodies which deal with research on endangered languages only, such as:
- DoBeS project of the Volkswagen Foundation
- ELDP Endangered Languages Documentation Programme sponsored by Arcadia.
- DEL interagency programme of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities
- FEL Foundation for Endangered Languages
- ELF Endangered Languages Fund
- GBS, Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen, whose current call for grant proposals is available in English here [pdf].
I will refer to the second group as “NGO grant bodies”, and the last group as “EL grant bodies” below. Note that I am not discussing other funding sources that may be used to support language work such as local employment creation projects; these are usually specific to particular places and it is difficult to generalise about them.

Money and respect – Frank Baarda

5 February 20113 March 2008 by Jane Simpson

[from Frank Baarda, long-term worker and resident in Yuendumu, Northern Territory]
If only it were only about the money.
Sociologists and anthropologists have written volumes about the effect of large injections of funds into small communities. Knitting a social fabric is a delicate, gradual and sequential activity that has to come mainly from within (outside authorities can however help to create the setting in which such knitting can flourish – or alternatively stuff things up). Here at Yuendumu you start with re-empowerment and relevance. No amount of money will instantly solve all our perceived problems.
The false perception has been created of all Aboriginal communities as being dysfunctional communities with rampant drunkenness, drug abuse, paedophilia, pornography, chronic health and education problems and a serious housing shortage.
I’m not saying improvements can’t or shouldn’t be made, just that infra-structure shouldn’t take precedence over social-structure. A house is not a home. Did you know that back in the 1960’s (or was it 1950’s?) when Ted Egan was the Superintendent at Yuendumu he turned back a few semi-trailers laden with Demountable houses?… ( a mini-intervention!).

Taking our show on the road

5 February 201124 February 2008 by admin

Last week David Nathan and I ran a Language Documentation Workshop at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies at the invitation of Toshihide (‘Toshi’) Nakayama, Associate Professor at ILCAA, the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, and author of Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) Morphosyntax among other publications. The workshop was attended by 18 graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from various Japanese universities from Sapporo to Kyoto, most of whom had already done some fieldwork. The attendees were remarkable for several reasons:

they all showed an amazing level of commitment to language documentation and fieldwork. Roughly half of them had bought recording equipment (Edirol R-9 was a favourite) with their own money – hard to imagine UK students coughing up the equivalent of 30,000 yen for their own machine. They mostly paid for fieldwork costs themselves;
they were working on a wide array of languages, from Alutor (Siberia), to Amdo Tibetan (China) to Bunun (Taiwan) to Dom (Papua New Guinea) to Cherokee (USA), requiring knowledge of contact languages as varied as Russian, Chinese and French (as well as English);
many of them endure tough conditions getting to and from the field – one student, for example, works in Siberia and it can take her three weeks to get to her field site. The journey involves three plane trips, and local flights in Russia can only be booked a maximum of three days in advance and are frequently cancelled or rescheduled so for each leg of the journey days of waiting to buy a ticket can be involved;
they receive little support and training from their home institutions – almost none had taken a field methods course, and none had received training in research methods, tools or workflows (apart from workshops Toshi has been running recently on software tools like Toolbox). When asked how they selected their field sites, one student told us his professor had said genkisoo ni mieru kara papua nyuuginea ni itte kure “since you look healthy go to Papua New Guinea” – he went to the University of Papua New Guinea, befriended a student from the highlands and ended up working on his language!
they willingly shared samples of their data and analysis with us;
they were very interested to learn and fully participated in the course until 6pm each day. Exhausting for us but great for them!

Seeking permission

5 February 201123 February 2008 by Jane Simpson

A blog reader writes:

I am continuing at a painfully slow pace to try to organize old field notes on Language L. [..] I have recordings [from the 1960s]. Some are just word lists of no great significance now. However, others are stories of various kinds and I wonder about reproducing them at least in printed form. My question is about the need to obtain permission from the speaker. I know some speakers have died; some are still alive; others I have no idea about and making contact will be difficult. [But someone is hopefully willing to help]. I have read about the general question of rights but am not sure what is generally considered best practice.
So, at least for people I know are alive and I think I can contact and get a response from, is there a form you can recommend which I could use to obtain permission to reproduce in print the stories they recorded? Does your department have guidelines for this sort of thing?
The only people I am likely to be able to contact have sufficiently good English to know what they are signing. However, for some of the people I recorded a Language L version would be more appropriate, which then brings up the problem of creating such a document in L.
Few speakers currently have web access, although that could change quickly. For example, the number of mobile phones in villages was generally fairly limited until a few months ago. Now it seems that, due to a new phone company arriving in PNG, many people in the village of 3,000 plus people have them. And the phones are used a lot for intra-village communication. It would only take a drop in the current high price of internet access and the arrival of cheaper computers for a similar big change to occur.

Sorry

5 February 201113 February 2008 by Jane Simpson

Sorry and hear it here.

Webster in Australia

5 February 201130 January 2008 by admin

During the recent federal election we frequently saw one of the most peculiar exceptions in Australian spelling practice, the name of the Australian Labor Party, where Labor is spelt without a u even though most Australians would include a u and write this word as labour in every other context. Although the spelling of the name of the Labor Party is exceptional today, it is not an isolated aberration but is rather one of the last remnants of variation that existed in spelling practice in Australia in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century but which has since disappeared. There may have been social and political factors that drove this variation but today the story that lies behind this variation is very difficult to piece together.

Update on Ngapartji Ngapartji – Public Forum on Indigenous languages

5 February 201128 January 2008 by Jane Simpson

A theatre production by Ngapartji Ngapartji (who run the interesting online Pitjantjatjara course I posted about in 2006) is having a sell-out run at the Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, with amazing reviews (links here) (e.g. The most important Australian work to inhabit our theatres for a long time. AussieTheatre.com).
(Information: Belvoir St Theatre on (02) 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au | www.sydneyfestival.org.au)
[Update 4/2/08 – this has led to more publicity for the plight of Indigenous languages, e.g. here on the ABC]
They are also having a public forum on Australian Indigenous languages Can you say ‘how do you do’ at Uluru? together with Big hART.
WHEN: 6-7pm, Wednesday January 30th 2008
WHERE: Belvoir Street Theatre. Belvoir St, Surry Hills, Sydney
HOSTED BY: Prof. Larissa Behrendt – Research Director, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, UTS

Australia’s linguistic exports

5 February 201125 January 2008 by admin

There is an article in Tuesday’s Education supplement of the The Guardian newspaper with the byline “Bowling Google a googly” about Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at Brighton University, who recently gave her inaugural lecture there. Professor Brabazon hails from Perth and the interview article makes much of her Australian connections (including her 2002 book Ladies Who Lunge that includes a discussion of another Australian academic export to the UK, Germaine Greer).
At the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Chicago two weeks ago, among the assembled linguists were seven Australians now established overseas:

Is mine big enough?

5 February 201115 January 2008 by admin

At the recent Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Chicago, Sandra Chung from University of California Santa Cruz gave an invited plenary address on the topic “How much can understudied languages really tell us about how language works?” She argued, among other things, that data from understudied languages should play a crucial role in the development of linguistic theory since only by including them can we get a full picture of the array of phenomena found in human languages that need to be taken account of. She illustrated her talk with examples from her work on Chamorro, an endangered Austronesian language spoken on Guam.
During the question time following Sandy’s talk, one person commented something along the following lines (I paraphrase, since I was rather stunned to hear the opinion being openly expressed before a linguistics audience, and don’t recall the exact formulation):

Linguistic research needs to concentrate on working with corpora and for the sort of languages you were talking about, like Chamorro, you will never be able to put together a corpus of sufficient size to be able to do anything meaningful. We should give up on the small (and disappearing) languages and concentrate on ones where we are likely to be able to get a decent sized corpus.