| 1. |
- Burenhult, Niclas, et al.
(författare)
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Domain-driven documentation : the case of landscape
- 2020
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Ingår i: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language Documentation. - 1934-5275. - 9780985621193 ; 21:21, s. 9-22
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is becoming increasingly evident that the field of language documentation and the docu¬mentary multimedia resources it produces rely on expanding their relevance and usability to disciplines beyond linguistics in order to increase their chances of being sustainable in the long term. This paper argues that more attention should be paid to the needs and interests of such disciplines in language documentation schemes. One way of doing so is to set out from fundamental domains of human experience in designing documentation programs, domains which are of immediate concern to disciplines such as geography, biology, history, anthropology, and so on. Particular focus is placed on the domain of land¬scape, explored in two documentation programs coordinated by the author. In addition to providing clear interdisciplinary arenas of inquiry, such domain-driven approaches also offer excellent opportunities for efficient collection and construction of the comprehen¬sive records of linguistic practices stipulated by current documentation initiatives.
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| 2. |
- Grzech, Karolina, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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Building trust on Zoom : A workflow for language documentation via videoconferencing software
- 2022
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Ingår i: Language Documentation & Conservation. - 1934-5275. ; 16, s. 79-97
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The COVID-19 pandemic affected the capacity to conduct linguistic fieldwork in person. For many fieldworkers, this meant they needed to adapt, and do so urgently. This paper discusses a language documentation workflow based entirely on the online conferencing software Zoom, in which a linguist, external to the community, establishes a new project together with a native-speaker community member. The paper describes how such a working relationship can be built online, and accounts for all the steps of the authors' Zoom-mediated workflow in detail allowing for their replication. It also offers a critical appraisal of this workflow from the perspectives of both the native speaker and the researcher. To conclude, the authors summarise all the conditions necessary for a workflow like this one to be successful.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Hammarström, Harald, et al.
(författare)
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Simultaneous Visualization of Language Endangerment and Language Description
- 2018
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Ingår i: Language Documentation & Conservation. - : University of Hawai'i Press. - 1934-5275. ; 12, s. 359-392
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The world harbors a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. Urgently indeed, many efforts are being launched to document and describe languages. This undertaking naturally has the priority toward the most endangered and least described languages. For the first time, we combine world-wide databases on language description (Glottolog) and language endangerment (ElCat, Ethnologue, UNESCO) and provide two online interfaces, GlottoScope and GlottoVis, to visualize these together. The interfaces are capable of browsing, filtering, zooming, basic statistics, and different ways of combining the two measures on a world map background. GlottoVis provides advanced techniques for combining cluttered dots on a map. With the tools and databases described we seek to increase the overall knowledge of the actual state language endangerment and description worldwide.
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| 5. |
- Marten, Lutz, et al.
(författare)
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Linguistic variation and the dynamics of language documentation: Editing in ‘pure’ Kagulu
- 2016
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Ingår i: Language Documentation & Conservation. - 1934-5275. ; 10, s. 105-129
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Tanzanian ethnic community language Kagulu is in extended language contact with the national language Swahili and other neighbouring community languages. The effects of contact are seen in vocabulary and structure, leading to a high degree of linguistic variation and to the development of distinct varieties of ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ Kagulu. A comprehensive documentation of the language needs to take this variation into account and to provide a description of the different varieties and their interaction. The paper illustrates this point by charting the development of a specific text within a language documentation project. A comparison of three versions of the text – a recorded oral story, a transcribed version of it and a further, edited version in which features of pure Kagulu are edited in – shows the dynamics of how the different versions of the text interact and provides a detailed picture of linguistic variation and of speakers’ use and exploitation of it. We show that all versions of the text are valid, ‘authentic’ representations of their own linguistic reality, and how all three of them, and the processes of their genesis, are an integral part of a comprehensive documentation of Kagulu and its linguistic ecology.
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| 6. |
- Reesink, Ger, et al.
(författare)
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Systematic typological comparison as a tool for investigating language history
- 2012
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Ingår i: Language Documentation & Conservation. - 1934-5275. ; :5, s. 34-71
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Similarities between languages can be due to 1) homoplasies because of a limited design space, 2) common ancestry, and 3) contact-induced convergence. Typological or structural features cannot prove genealogy, but they can provide historical signals that are due to common ancestry or contact (or both). Following a brief summary of results obtained from the comparison of 160 structural features from 121 languages (Reesink, Singer & Dunn 2009), we discuss some issues related to the relative dependencies of such features: logical entailment, chance resemblance, typological dependency, phylogeny and contact. This discussion focusses on the clustering of languages found in a small sample of 11 Austronesian and 8 Papuan languages of eastern Indonesia, an area known for its high degree of admixture.
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| 7. |
- Webster, Jenny, et al.
(författare)
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Scoring sign language vitality : Adapting a spoken language survey to target the endangerment factors affecting sign languages
- 2019
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Ingår i: Language Documentation & Conservation. - 1934-5275. ; 13, s. 346-383
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores factors affecting the vitality/endangerment levels of sign languages, and how these levels were assessed through an international collaboration using a systematic scoring scheme. This included adapting UNESCO's Linguistic Vitality and Diversity survey and developing a system for determining endangerment levels based on the responses. Other endangerment scales are briefly explored along with UNESCO's, and the survey adaptation and systematic scoring processes are explained. The survey needed to be carefully adapted because even though many spoken language procedures can be also used for sign languages, there are additional challenges and characteristics that uniquely affect sign language communities. The article then presents the vitality scores for 15 languages, including both national and village sign languages, and the major factors threatening their vitality. The methodology of scoring based on averages is innovative, as is the workflow between the questionnaire respondents and scoring committee. Such innovations may also be useful for spoken languages. Future efforts might develop best practice models for promoting sign language vitality and compile diachronic data to monitor changes in endangerment status. The findings can also inform policy work to bring about legal recognition, greater communication access, and the protection of deaf signers' linguistic and cultural identity.
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| 8. |
- Zariquiey, Roberto, et al.
(författare)
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Linking endangerment databases and descriptive linguistics : an assessment of the use of terms relating to language endangerment in grammars
- 2022
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Ingår i: Language Documentation & Conservation. - : University of Hawaii Press. - 1934-5275. ; 16, s. 290-318
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The world harbours a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. The increased urgency has led to the development of several global endangerment databases and a more fine-grained understanding of the language endangerment progression as well as its possible reversal. In the present paper, we explore the terminological correlates of this development as found in the descriptive linguistic literature, using a corpus of over 10,000 digitized grammatical descriptions. Comparing this with existing endangerment databases, we find that simply counting terms related to endangerment does signal endangerment, but the degree of endangerment is more difficult to assess from grammatical descriptions. The label endangered seems to be an umbrella term that covers different situations ranging from moribund languages with less than ten speakers to minority languages with several thousand speakers. For many languages considered endangered in existing databases, explicit terms to this effect cannot be found in their descriptions. The discrepancy is due to incompleteness of the searchterm set, gaps in the literature, and projected rather than observed information in the databases. Our explorations illustrate the potential for database curation assisted by computational searches both to maintain accuracy of the databases and to investigate assumed language endangerment. Future work includes a larger cloud of search terms, usage of term frequencies, and prescreening of descriptive literature for the existence of a relevant section. From the perspective of descriptive linguistics, this study calls for a more careful correlation between the language endangerment indexes, as developed in the global endangerment databases, and the treatment of the endangerment status of individual languages in descriptive grammars.
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