Endangered Languages and Cultures

I have been asked on a number of occasions to talk to general audiences in England about linguistic diversity and the threat to smaller languages. I usually begin my talks by asking which languages are spoken by members of the audience (the largest number I recall was around 15) and then how many languages are spoken in London. Everyone is aware that London is a linguistically diverse place (during my morning bus commute I frequently hear various European languages spoken, especially Polish, Russian and Portuguese, along with Yoruba, Bangla, and Kurdish, plus other languages I am unable to identify). Few members of the general public however have any idea just how linguistically diverse London is – “there must be dozens” or “a hundred at least” are common responses.
And the correct answer is?

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For some time now I’ve misguidedly thought that there was very little attention paid to polysynthesis in the CA (Conversation Analysis) literature. I now realize how very wrong I was. On the contrary, it seems that polysynthesis and CA go together like love and marriage, but I was too blind to see it. As I digested as much of the literature as I could find, I really only came across one book and three obscure papers by Roger Spielmann on Ojibwe interaction and I thought that’s about where it ends. You see I was having trouble trying reconcile Murriny Patha conversation with what I was reading. Typologically it is just light years removed from everything being discussed. And much of the literature in interactional linguistics is very syntactically oriented rather than morphosyntactically oriented. I had been thinking that conversation analysts had studiously avoided this type of language (Spielmann being the exception). However I must have had blinkers on or something. You know what it’s like when you can’t see the wood for the trees?

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[From Jeremy Hammond, Field methods student, University of Sydney]
In Australia the relocation or ‘resettlement’ of Indigenous Australians during the 20th century has caused the extinction of many dialects. The then Government motives of assimilation have caused fractured social and cultural landscapes. In western NSW at Lake Cargelligo, the Ngiyampaa and Paakantji people were relocated to Murrin Bridge in Wiradjuri Country and have lost much of their cultural knowledge.
Elsewhere in the world there are similar patterns and in particular high rates of urbanisation (such as in Vanuatu and PNG) may exacerbate this process. During a course on development in the Mekong River Region, I was made aware of entire village movement in the name of ‘progress’ (and check out today’s ABC Ockham’s Razor commentary by Milton Osborne on the Mekong and the Salween Rivers – he wrote River at risk).

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[Joint post by Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS and Jane Simpson]
There has been a flare up on the LINGTYP list again (cf. PKA’s post last week) – this time from Gideon Goldenberg who suggested there is a distinction between research (good) and data collection (bad). He was writing about typological databases but it looks like the same opinion applies to documentary linguistic corpora – here’s what he said:

“The clear and sharp distinction between research and materials is essential. The latter will be needed to illustrate scholarly discussion, but data themselves are not research even though they require thoughtful preparation. When electronic means became available there was the hope that from then on the mere accumulation of data would no longer be able to give credit of scientific work; it unfortunately turns to go the other way about. To share databases with others is OK and can be beneficial, but do not mistake it for research.”

Ouch! All those digitised sound and video recordings with time-aligned multi-tier annotated corpora with linked metadata that we’ve been creating are fine and dandy, but it ain’t research folks!

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