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Wunderkammer update

5 February 201126 May 2009 by admin

Work continues on the Wunderkammer software package, which makes electronic dictionaries available on mobile phones. A new version of the package, with new features and bug fixes, is available from the Wunderkammer website: http://www.pfed.info/wksite/ We’ll be presenting the Wunderkammer software and talking about some of the dictionaries that use it on 1 June 4pm to … Read more

Endangered languages and finances

5 February 201113 May 2009 by admin

The financial difficulties currently facing the world’s economies are having an impact on funding and support for research on endangered languages in various ways. (I heard the current situation referred to in Australia last month as The GFC (“Global Financial Crisis”), an acronym that I initially confused with The BFG (as a Roald Dahl fan) … Read more

EuroBABEL projects announced

5 February 201112 May 2009 by admin

As I reported back in October 2007, the European Science Foundation has been working on a project called EuroBABEL(standing for “Better Analyses Based on Endangered Languages”) as part of the EUROCORES collaborative research infrastructure. The main goal of the EuroBABEL is:

“to promote empirical research on underdescribed endangered languages, both spoken and signed, that aims at changing and refining our ideas about linguistic structure in general and about language in relation to cognition, social and cultural organization and related issues in a trans-/multi-disciplinary perspective”

After a complex selection process that involved review by an international expert panel and then negotiations with national funding agencies, ESF has just announced the successful EuroBABEL projects:

Fieldwork workshops

5 February 201110 May 2009 by admin

It seems that linguistic fieldwork has become a topic that is attracting quite a lot of interest lately. As Sheena Van Der Mark from La Trobe University recently wrote, there will be a workshop on Non-linguistic aspects of fieldwork at the Australian Linguistic Society annual conference in July.
On the 22nd of this month, SOAS Linguistics Department will be hosting a workshop on Teaching field linguistics techniques, organised in conjunction with the LLAS, the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, the UK national body which supports teaching of languages, linguistics and area studies in higher education. We anticipate roughly 40 attendees, including students interested in learning more about fieldwork, and staff who are considering how fieldwork might fit into the linguistics curriculum. Presentations will be given by staff and post-graduate students from SOAS, Manchester University and Queen Mary, University of London, covering the following topics (in line with my remarks from two years ago here and here (see especially the comments section), we are aiming to cover a range of fieldwork types, including language documentation-type fieldwork and urban sociolinguistic-type fieldwork):

ELAP students fieldtrip

5 February 20111 April 2009 by admin

The Endangered Languages Academic Programme at SOAS is experimenting this year with including hands-on in situ fieldwork as part of our MA in Language Documentation and Description.

A group of MA students is currently carrying out two weeks of fieldwork in Guernsey with Dr Julia Sallabank, Research Fellow in Language Support and Revitalisation, who has been doing research on Dgèrnésiais (the locally preferred spelling, more commonly spelled Guernésiais) for many years. The students are documenting contemporary language use and making digital audio and video recordings of narrative and conversations, putting into practice the knowledge and skills they have been acquiring in their MA coursework, especially the half-units Field Methods and Technology and Language Documentation. Dgèrnésiais is the nearest autochthonous endangered language to SOAS and is estimated by Jan Marquis, the Guernsey Language Support Officer, to have around 1,000 speakers (just 2% of the population), with the bulk of them aged over 60. The trip is timed to coincide with the annual Guernsey Eisteddfod which includes poetry and speaking competitions.

Report on EL Week 2009

5 February 20112 March 2009 by admin

Endangered Languages Week 2009 has come and (just) gone, ending on Saturday with the second day of the workshop on Ideology and Beliefs on endangered languages. It was a fun, if exhausting week (made even more exhausting by having to teach our regular classes this year as it took place during term time), marked by having lots of visitors from as far away as New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Canada, as well as more local visitors from throughout Europe and the UK. The nice thing was that quite a number of people came to London for the whole week to participate in the various events.

Unesco’s “Atlas of The World’s Languages in Danger”

5 February 201121 February 2009 by admin

Unesco has just published the latest version on its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger edited by Christopher Moseley (the original 1996 and 2001 editions were edited by the late Stephen A. Wurm). The on-line interactive version of the Atlas is now available and the book version is due out soon. There is also a downloadable map in .pdf format (warning, it’s 20 Mbytes in size and unless you have access to a very large monitor or printer it is not terribly usable).
The editorial group who assisted Moseley is a veritable who’s who of specialists in endangered languages, including 27 experts from 13 named regions, supplemented by 6 specialists who provided “complementary information on specific areas”. Having spoken to several of the contributors personally (including one colleague I met in Tokyo last week), it appears that preparation of the database underlying the Atlas was not all harmony and light and resulted in some disagreements among contributors. Not so unusual in endangered languages research, I guess.
I had a little cruise around the interactive presentation, which uses a Google Maps interface and noticed quite a few oddities in regions where I have a little knowledge. Perhaps readers of this blog will notice more. There is a “Contribute your comments” link to the website but it appears to be broken because all it does is display the same page. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere one could point out apparent errors to Unesco and the editor, however it is possible to comment on individual listed languages by clicking on their “pin” on the Google Map and going to the “Comments” tab in the information that pops up. The comment then disappears and where it goes is not at all clear.
Here are a few other things I noticed:

Back in Tokyo

5 February 20119 February 2009 by admin

9 February 2009
David Nathan, Director of the Endangered Languages Archive, at SOAS, and I are back in Tokyo at the invitation of Toshihide Nakayama of ILCAA, the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies for 10 days to run a workshop on language documentation that follows up our 2008 workshop. This year we are taking a different tack and focusing the week of seminars and practical sessions on the principles and practices of archiving endangered languages materials. The week begins on Monday (today) with preparations in the morning and David’s public lecture on “Archiving endangered language materials” in the afternoon. Classes begin in earnest on Tuesday and run until Friday, with sessions from 10am to 5pm each day. There will be 15 attendees, mostly students who are doing fieldwork in various locations around the world. Details of the workshop can be found here.
The topics we plan to cover include:

Language documentation and language archiving – major issues
Audio – good practices refresher
Audio recording – how to make great audio
Data and metadata – good practices refresher
Data management practical
Workflow for archiving
Mobilisation and delivery of language materials
Transcription, annotation, translation – good practices refresher
IP and ethical issues in the delivery, usage, and archiving of materials

There will be group work in the practical sessions and a final discussion with presentations by the attendees on the last day. If time and energy permit I will blog about how the workshop goes and report on some of the outcomes.

Announcement: 3L Summer School

5 February 20117 February 2009 by admin

The Department of Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies is proud to announce the second 3L International Summer School on Language Documentation and Description to be held in London 22nd June to 3rd July 2009 (information about the summer school is also available en français). Courses will be in English, with tutorial and practical sessions in French and English. There will be two conferences associated with the summer school (see below).

This two week summer school aims at introducing the concepts and practices of language documentation and its links to language description for future and novice field linguists. It will draw upon the extensive expertise of the three organising universities in the 3L Consortium: University of Lyon, Leiden University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. It follows on from the success of the first 3L Summer School held in Lyon in 2008.

Endangered Languages Week 2009

5 February 20111 February 2009 by admin

After the success of last year, we are running Endangered Languages Week 2009 at SOAS from 22nd to 28th February. The theme this year is “Endangered languages: who cares?”
Endangered Languages Week will presents a variety of displays, discussions, films, and workshops to provide a view of what is happening to languages around the world and what is being done to document, archive and support endangered languages at SOAS and elsewhere. Activities will include: