The documentation of endangered languages: The case of Cankiri Poshas

Reviewed by: Keeping Languages Alive: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization ed. by Mari C. Jones and Sarah Ogilvie, and: Endangered Languages and New Technologies ed. by Mari C. Jones Claire Bowern Keeping Languages Alive: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization. Edited by Mari C. Jones and Sarah Ogilvie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 269. $95.00 (hardcover). Endangered Languages and New Technologies. Edited by Mari C. Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 211. $99.00 (hardcover). Two recent volumes from Cambridge University Press discuss aspects of language endangerment and the documentary record. The eleven contributions to Endangered Languages and New Technologies describe ways in which digital technology (particularly the World Wide Web) can help language documentation and preservation efforts. The sixteen papers in Jones and Ogilvie’s collection, on the other hand, present case studies on documentation, pedagogy, and revitalization of endangered language. Both books have excellent global coverage, with chapters describing languages in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Both include chapters on both signed and spoken languages; the Jones and Ogilvie volume, Keeping Languages Alive, also includes a chapter on a whistled (auxiliary) language. Both books have chapters oriented to endangered language communities, rather than researchers—or directed to both audiences—and taken together, they offer an inspiring snapshot of the many, varied ways in which people across the world are addressing issues of language endangerment. For the contributors to Endangered Languages and New Technologies, “new technologies” mostly involve the Internet and web delivery of content, whether for researchers (as in the chapters by Sjef Barbiers and Dorothee Beermann) or communities and language learners (as in Russell Hugo’s chapter). An exception is the chapter by [End Page 211] Hugh Patterson III on designing keyboard layouts. Others focus on database creation, including linking of underlying data and the creation of data sets that facilitate research on endangered languages. The case studies presented here form a fine cross section of both languages and topics, and I came away from the volume with a renewed appreciation of the richness of the options for endangered language tool kits. Thus, this book will be of interest both for researchers and for community members looking to brainstorm solutions to particular problems. For example, Hugo Patterson III provides a very nice overview of the issues that need to be considered in designing keyboards for typing endangered languages, a crucial extension of the discussion of “orthographies” that linguists may already be familiar with (see also the contributions to Cahill and Rice 2014). In my experience, one of the major factors in orthography development has been ease of typing (for example, the fact that digraphs are preferred over complex glyphs or accents in many “practical” Australian orthographies). The variety of contributions leaves the reader with a good impression of the range of the problems confronting language engineering, particularly for languages with neither large resources nor a big digital footprint. However, I also felt that I was somehow missing the big picture. I wanted someone to draw the individual contributions together, and to give an overview of the challenges and the ways in which researchers and communities are responding; in short, to synthesize the very local discussions into a more general framework. Perhaps that is impossible, given the myriad of communities. The introductory chapter (by Nicholas Ostler) could have provided such an overview, but in fact has a different focus. To be sure, Ostler does address the big picture, inasmuch as he examines how languages across the world are responding to English. He argues that the further development of language technologies will increase accessibility to “the smaller 99 per cent of the world’s languages” (p. 3). He also points out that while English is still an important global lingua franca, the factors that have facilitated English’s worldwide spread have now peaked, and English is not making inroads as a mother tongue in the home, even if it is an important language of wider communication; moreover, “speakers of robust languages have no motive to shift their home use to English just because they may use it for work or leisure” (p. 3). While this may be true as...

Relatively little is known about Africa’s endangered languages. In an era when we are racing against time to study and preserve the world’s threatened languages before they go extinct, a disproportionately low amount of research and funding is devoted to the study of endangered African languages when compared to any other linguistically threatened region in the world. More regrettably, even less has been done to create a community of Africanists and concerned linguists who might work on rectifying this situation. This book puts some of Africa’s many endangered languages in the spotlight in the hope of reversing this trend. Both documentary and theoretical perspectives are taken with a view toward highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the two approaches and exploring its consequences for research on and preservation of endangered languages, both in the African context and more broadly. The articles that comprise this volume collectively advocate nurturing synergistic partnerships between documentary and theoretical linguists researching endangered African languages in order to stimulate and enhance the depth, visibility, and impact of endangered African language research in the service of altering the landscape of scholarship and activism in this field.

The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, in thirty-nine chapters, provides a comprehensive overview of the efforts that are being undertaken to deal with this crisis. Its purposes are (1) to provide a reasonably comprehensive reference volume, with the scope of the volume as a whole representing the breadth of the field; (2) to highlight both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it; and (3) to broaden understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, and, in so doing, to encourage and contribute to fresh thinking and new findings in support of endangered languages. The handbook is organized into five parts. Part I, Endangered Languages, addresses some of the fundamental issues that are essential to understanding the nature of the endangered languages crisis. Part II, Language Documentation provides an overview of the issues and activities of concern to linguists and others in their efforts to record and document endangered languages. Part III, Language Revitalization encompasses a diverse range of topics, including approaches, practices, and strategies for revitalizing endangered and sleeping (“dormant”) languages. Part IV, Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity, extends the discussion of language endangerment beyond its conventional boundaries to consider the interrelationship of language, culture, and environment. Part V, Looking to the Future, addresses a variety of topics that are certain to be of consequence in future efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages.

Reviewed by: Endangered Languages of Austronesia Aone van Engelenhoven Endangered Languages of Austronesia. Edited by Margaret Florey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 304. $165.00 (cloth). Margaret Florey is well-known among fellow Austronesianists for her continuing and successful efforts to defend the linguistic rights of communities whose languages are truly small and often very endangered. This book fully meets the expectations that her name raises. The book contains four parts. Part 1 is an overview, with an introduction by Florey and a chapter on language documentation in the West Austronesian world and Vanuatu by Alexander Adelaar. Part 2 discusses linguistic vitality, while part 3 contains information on several initiatives related to capacity building and revitalization. Part 4 focuses on pedagogical approaches to revitalization and maintenance. In her introduction, Florey notes that she coined the term "Austronesia" to refer to insular Southeast Asia and Oceania, where most Austronesian languages are spoken, [End Page 81] with Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa added as a kind of Austronesian exclave. Adelaar's chapter shows that it would be a mistake to interpret the term as implying a geographical unity, since "Austronesia" covers a multitude of different nations with different traditions and perceptions. Adelaar introduces the Austronesian language family and provides a concise overview of projects on endangered languages in the Austronesian-speaking world—from the island of Madagascar east of Africa to the island republic of Vanuatu east of Australia. So many different languages cannot possibly be covered in one chapter; Adelaar confines himself to projects for which information was accessible either through the Internet sites of their funders or through publications by their project members. No attention is given to mainland Southeast Asia, where Austronesian languages are a minority, although Adelaar does provide information about Austronesian language projects in Sri Lanka, the Comoros, the Netherlands, and Surinam. Adelaar discusses the major organizations involved in language documentation, many of which are based outside of the Austronesian-speaking regions. Although he mentions the efforts undertaken by the Indonesian National Language Center, he overlooks the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO), which Margaret Florey and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann quote in their contribution and which has a long and successful tradition of cooperation with the Language Center on endangered language research in Indonesia, as evidenced by the many publications of the Indonesian Linguistics Development Projects (ILDEP). Adelaar summarizes the state of the art in endangered language documentation in Madagascar, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan, the Philippines, East Timor, and Vanuatu. He gives somewhat more extended coverage to the diaspora, since the case studies come from a variety of places around the world, and, of course, to Indonesia, due to its geographical size. Part 2 treats the theory of linguistic vitality and its assessments and challenges. Three of its chapters discuss languages in Indonesia, and the fourth discusses Negrito languages in the Philippines. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann's chapter is one of the most significant contributions for understanding the process for language endangerment and loss. He introduces the term "language endangerment scenario," by which he means "a specific and complex constellation of varied factors of language endangerment" (p. 45). He distinguishes symptoms and factors of language endangerment. He introduces two endangerment scenarios, the immigration scenario and the emigration scenario, using the Tomini-Tolitoli languages of Sulawesi Island as an example. He goes on to distinguish "moribund" from "endangered" and "long-term endangered" languages. He compares his characterizations of language endangerment with the information on Buru in the subsequent chapter, which confirms the usefulness of the scenario approach for endangered language research. Himmelmann concludes that a typology of endangerment scenarios is required that enables a systematization of the arrays of factors that lead to large scale language shift. Charles E. Grimes approaches language death in Eastern Indonesia by detailed consideration of two languages, Hukumina and Kayeli, spoken on Buru Island in the Indonesian province of Maluku. He grounds his examination of how these languages became extinct in a discussion of the history and present-day language ecology on the island, including a short anthropological digression on power and place on the island; he then seeks similar scenarios elsewhere in Central Maluku. Finally...

Advances in speech and language processing have enabled the creation of applications that could, in principle, accelerate the process of language documentation, as speech communities and linguists work on urgent language documentation and reclamation projects. However, such systems have yet to make a significant impact on language documentation, as resource requirements limit the broad applicability of these new techniques. We aim to exploit the framework of shared tasks to focus the technology research community on tasks which address key pain points in language documentation. Here we present initial steps in the implementation of these new shared tasks, through the creation of data sets drawn from endangered language repositories and baseline systems to perform segmentation and speaker labeling of these audio recordings—important enabling steps in the documentation process. This paper motivates these tasks with a use case, describes data set curation and baseline systems, and presents results on this data. We then highlight the challenges and ethical considerations in developing these speech processing tools and tasks to support endangered language documentation.

Despite having numerous Chinese language varieties and non-Chinese ethnic minority languages, China is often considered a monolingual nation (Liang, Sihua. 2015. Language Attitudes and Identities in Multilingual China: A Linguistic Ethnography. London: Springer, 154). The country’s strong monolingual language policy heavily promotes a single standard language – Putonghua. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate ‘regional Putonghua’ varieties, contact varieties that have emerged from standard language promotion and community second language acquisition (e.g. Xiao, Jinsong. 2007. “Putonghua Zhongjieyu Yanjiu Shuping.” Journal of Yunyang Normal College 27 (2): 119–122). This paper analyses data collected from Weibo, China’s online microblogging site, to investigate the language ideologies surrounding these ‘non-standard’ regional varieties. Two cities (Ningbo and Shanghai) and their local Putonghua varieties are examined: the cities share a similar linguistic background but Shanghai is more economically advanced than its neighbouring city Ningbo, and the language varieties in Shanghai are also believed to have more prestige (Zhou, Minglang. 2001. “The Spread of Putonghua and Language Attitude Changes in Shanghai and Guangzhou, China.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 11 (2): 231–253). Discourse analysis on Weibo posts allows us to show how regional Putonghua varieties are portrayed and perceived by laypeople and how they exist as ‘non-standard’ varieties in the shadow of the strong standard language ideology. These ‘non-standard’ varieties are associated with rich language ideologies and social meanings and their links to both negative cultural stereotypes and positive local identities often associated with vernacular varieties are also discussed.

Reviewed by: Endangered languages of Austronesia Gary Holton Endangered languages of Austronesia. Ed. by Margaret Florey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 448. ISBN 9780199544547. $165 (Hb). As described by the editor, this book ‘canvasses a range of language endangerment scenarios encountered across Austronesia’ (4). Though not explicitly acknowledged, the volume was clearly inspired by the International Conference on Austronesian Endangered Language Documentation, held June 2007 in Taiwan. Four papers from that conference appear in this volume: those by Florey and Himmelmann, Thieberger, Sercombe, and Rau and Yang. An additional eleven papers from that conference were published in a proceedings volume (Rau & Florey 2007). The paper by Rau and Yang appears in both volumes. Most of the papers appear to have been prepared in 2007, as no works later than that date are cited in the list of references. The fourteen individual chapters discuss language situations in Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, East Timor, and Vanuatu. The coverage is by no means even across the region. Five of the fourteen chapters focus on languages of Indonesia, while two of them are devoted to Vanuatu. This unevenness is perhaps best summed up by Adelaar’s overview of language documentation efforts, which refers to the ‘West Austronesian world and Vanuatu’ (12). This West Austronesian, or more specifically Indonesian, bias obscures variations in language policy across the region. While there are clearly interesting points of comparison to be drawn within the Indonesian context, language policies and the endangerment context are largely similar. Much could be gained by comparing the Indonesian situation with that in other Austronesian states to the east. In this regard the absence of studies from Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Hawaii, and New Zealand is particularly notable. In each of those places Austronesian languages are under different kinds of threats. The title of the book refers to Austronesia rather than Austronesian. The choice of the geographic term Austronesia seems to imply a focus on a geographic rather than linguistic region, but given that all of the languages discussed in the volume belong to the Austronesian family, it is not clear that any substantive difference is intended by this choice of terminology. The seemingly opportunistic coverage in this volume leads one to ask whether the endangered languages of Austronesia form any kind of coherent grouping. In other words, what is it about the endangered languages of this region that is unique and different from endangered languages in other parts of the world? It is not at all clear that shared linguistic history correlates in any way with endangerment status or pathways of language decay. Political and social history would seem a much better correlate. Florey justifies the focus on endangered Austronesian languages by drawing parallels with other recent works devoted to endangered languages of particular regions. Yet, this comparison sells the book short, since such works are focused for the most part either (i) on languages within a particular sociopolitical context (e.g. Australia, Canada) or (ii) on linguistic descriptions of languages within a region that happen to be endangered (cf. Wetzels 2007). The current volume differs from these in two important ways. First, it is not a survey; it makes no claim to be representative. The strength of this approach is that it permits the contributors to provide detailed descriptions of community responses to endangerment scenarios. Understanding language endangerment requires a long view. While language documentation can be undertaken in a period of months or years, understanding language endangerment, shift, maintenance, and revitalization often requires decades of fieldwork. We are unlikely to have such detailed information from every language in a family, but where we do have it, it is very useful. A second and even more important feature of this volume is its focus on endangerment rather than endangered languages per se. Many recent volumes that purport to be about language endangerment turn out instead to be areal studies of languages from a particular region or family. This volume is different: it is not merely a set of linguistic descriptions of Austronesian languages that happen also to be endangered; rather, the focus is on why and how these languages have become endangered, and on what is being done to address...

African languages have played an important role in the development of linguistic theory but their role in the fields of historical linguistics and linguistic typology has been less prominent. Africa’s linguistic diversity has been long underestimated given the dominance of the four-family model proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Criticism of this model has long held among specialists in some of Africa’s smaller and lesser-known language families, but has only recently become more widely acknowledged among linguists. Archaeologists, geneticists, and others continue to model African prehistory based on African linguistic classifications, which are outdated and which have failed to withstand scrutiny. This teaching and learning guide suggests a program to train scholars in recognizing and evaluating the standards by which various African language classifications have been made. Africa’s linguistic diversity will be shown to be far greater than what is suggested by the four-family model.

Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalayan Endangered Languages Archive (SiDHELA) created by the Centre for Endangered Languages, Sikkim University is India’s first endangered language archive. This archive is part of the ongoing language documentation initiatives of the Centre funded by the University Grant Commission. The Centre, formally established in December 2016 aims for preservation and promotion of endangered languages in Sikkim and North Bengal. The Centre carries out documentation and description of the indigenous endangered languages of the region through linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork. SiDHELA conceptualised as a platform for a linguistic resource of the languages spoken in the region, houses the primary data collected through fieldwork. One of the main aims of this archive is to preserve the data for long term usage and dissemination. Central Library, Sikkim University hosts the archive under its digital library. Through this archive the Centre for Endangered Languages, Sikkim University seeks not just to preserve and protect but also to promote the use of endangered languages spoken in the region. This paper presents the journey of this archive from idea to reality. This paper outlines the motivation behind the conceptualisation of SiDHELA as a regional archive and then discusses its development. It includes discussion on the developmental platform, theoretical issues in the conceptualisation of the archive and practical challenges in its design and development and its prospects. This paper thus primarily intends to inform scholars and researchers working with endangered languages of the region about this archive and its development. Finally, it hopes to kindle interest among researchers and librarians for developments of more such regional archives.

This paper explores the distance between documenting and revitalizing endangered languages and indicates critical points at which applied linguistics can play a role. We look at language documentation, language revitalization and their relationship. We then provide some examples from our own work. We see the lack of applied linguistics as a potential missing link in endangered language work. We call for more applied linguistic training and research focused on endangered languages, more attention to endangered languages within second language pedagogy programmes and a heightened awareness of the need for teamwork across all stakeholders in endangered language contexts.

In response to a crescendo of public and scholarly interest, over the last two decades there has been a noticeable and mostly welcome surge in publications that focus on language documentation, conservation, and revitalization. Early and high impact contributions in Hale et al. (1992) included a now seminal article by Michael Krauss which called for urgent action to prevent linguistics from going down in history as the ‘only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated’ (Krauss 1992:10). There then followed a discussion on the topic by Ladefoged (1992) and a prompt reply by Dorian (1993) that situated the issue of language endangerment as one deserving of sustained academic attention. Alongside swelling bookshelves that speak to the urgency of this work, major research programs funded by private philanthropic organizations and research councils were also being established at this time. The Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) was founded in 1995, followed a year later by the Endangered Language Fund (ELF). With the establishment of the Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen program (DoBeS) in 2000, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) in 2002, and the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program funded by the US government in 2005, the last two decades bear witness to a steady increase in support, funding, and visibility for the documentation and preservation of endangered languages.

Growing awareness of possibilities created by digital technologies coupled with an increasing concern about endangered languages has led to a wide variety of language revitalization, preservation, and documentation projects. Information professionals, who have played a surprisingly small role in these activities, need to cultivate a greater understanding of the specific needs of groups engaged in digital language projects in order to mediate between digital repositories and users. A review of the data from a field study of an endangered indigenous Thai sign language, Ban Khor Sign, serves as a limit example of the complexity of the documentary interventions grouped under the rubric of “language archive.” The language archive problem demands a total information solution involving informaticists, archivists and museologists, and librarians.

1. Introduction (by Essegbey, James) 2. Language endangerment and documentation 3. Unintended consequences of methodological and practical responses to language endangerment in Africa (by Ameka, Felix K.) 4. Different cultures, different attitudes: But how different is African situation really? (by Dimmendaal, Gerrit J.) 5. Ideologies and typologies of language endangerment in Africa (by Lupke, Friederike) 6. The role of colonial languages in language endangerment in Africa (by Connell, Bruce) 7. Can a language endanger itself?: Reshaping repertoires in urban Senegal (by Mc Laughlin, Fiona) 8. Is this my language?: Developing a writing system for an endangered-language community (by Essegbey, James) 9. Development, language revitalization, and culture: The case of the Mayan languages of Guatemala, and their relevance for African languages (by Rohloff, Peter) 10. Some challenges of language documentation in African multilingual settings (by Ngue um, Emmanuel) 11. How to document particular domains or use documentary data to address specific issues 12. Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork (by Dingemanse, Mark) 13. Out of context: Documenting languages in immigrant and refugee communities (by Henderson, Brent) 14. Archaeological inspiration and historical inference: Directions for Edoid linguistic studies (by Schaefer, Ronald P.) 15. Describing endangered languages: Experiences from a PhD grammar project in Africa (by Seidel, Frank) 16. Index 17. Language index

This study investigates the properties of a set of Italian adverbs (among others: pure ‘also’, solo ‘only’, un po’ ‘a bit’) that, in specific contexts of use, modify the speech acts in which they appear. On the one hand, these elements specify the way in which a speech act should be interpreted with reference to the specific interactional context, modifying its illocutionary force. On the other hand, they index presupposed/inferred meanings active in the common ground of the interaction, integrating the speech act in the common ground. These functions closely resemble those of the elements that, especially in the German linguistic tradition, are called modal particles. Drawing on original data from Italian – both from the standard language and regional varieties – the goal of the study is to describe the synchronic features of these elements and to explain the emergence of the modal uses. For this purpose, it jointly employs theoretical notions of pragmatics (speech act theory, inferences in interaction), models of language change (reanalysis and conventionalization) and the descriptive tools of sociolinguistic approaches. Through the presentation of four case studies, integrating corpus and questionnaire data, the present work gives a thorough analysis of the modal functions and the contexts of use of the adverbs under investigation: it explores their role at the semantics/pragmatics interface, it discusses their place in a layered model of grammar and it examines their distribution across different language varieties.

The nature and processes of language endangerment in Africa continue to be debated and contested (see e.g. Luepke 2009). There is however a consensus among linguists on language documentation as a strategy for safeguarding Africa’s linguistic diversity. Nevertheless, Africanist linguists are divided on how far linguists involved in language documentation should be language activists or get involved in language support work (Ladefoged 1992) and on how to train African students for the task of documenting African languages (Newman 2003). In this paper I examine some of the practices that are associated with language documentation whose principal goal is the creation of a multi-purpose record for posterity. I argue that some of these practices, despite the good intentions, in the end do not promote the preservation of linguistic diversity. I demonstrate that practices of orthography development, standardisation, literacy and development of pedagogical materials in endangered languages of Africa will in the end kill the variation and multilingual practices that are prevalent on the continent. African language documentarians are faced with questions of editing oral material for use in school books for example. Some consequences of some of these practices are explored. I advocate that Africanists should pay more attention to the multimodal modes of representation and in particular take advantage of the oral nature of the socio-cultural communities of practice and develop methods that promote diversity rather than kill it.