I was interviewed last week for PRI’s the World: The World of Words for a podcast that was published on 26 September. The interviewer, Patrick Cox, who is based in Boston, contacted me after reading my Guardian Top 10 Endangered Languages and seeing a copy of the book 1000 Languages which I edited and which was published in North America on 1st September.
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FollowHeard on the radio
Along with the use of mobile phones for fieldwork and dictionaries (noting that the latter wouldn’t work (yet) in Africa due to the lack of 3G phones that could run the required software), another information and communication technology that has applications in endangered languages research and language support is radio. In Australia the Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) has been in operation since the1970’s and is well known for its promotion of central Australian Aboriginal languages.
I have recently heard of two other more grass roots instances of community radio stations broadcasting in indigenous languages. At a workshop on “Engagement and Activism in Endangered Languages Research”, Maurizio Gnerre of Universita Orientale in Naples spoke about the use of radio in two Latin American communities, as his abstract states:
Engaged Scholarship
The issues of the engagement of social science researchers in direct involvement in community activism, integration of activism with research and scholarship, and ways to ensure wider communication of our research results were topics of a one-day meeting held in Chicago last week. The Interdisciplinary Institute on Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) organised a workshop entitled “Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice: Transcending the Campus, Transforming the Academy” on 12th September.
The topics explored at the workshop were:
- How do we translate our scholarship and research findings into an accessible language that allows us to then engage in discussions and debates with a diverse range of communities? Can we write books and dissertations that working class friends and relatives can actually read?
- How do we reconcile notions of ‘objectivity’ with our own passions for and commitment to issues and communities? Can you love a subject and still analyze, research and assess it as a scholar? Should we be accountable, responsible or concerned with the application and outcomes of our research?
- How do we forge creative new methodologies that help us ask new questions and get at new insights and information? How does pedagogy reflect politics? What’s the connection between what we teach and how we teach it?
- Where does ‘utopia’ and imagined futures fit into our work as social scientists and scholars in the humanities, and as teachers and students? Is our job to help students acquire skills and to better understand the known world, as well as to ‘dream’ of what we can only imagine?
Fieldwork by phone
The telephone has a deal of history as a device for collecting data on languages. For example, the English language Switchboard Corpus was collected from telephone conversations in 1990-91 and, according to the manual:
“is a corpus of spontaneous conversations … [c]ollected at Texas Instruments with funding by DARPA, … [and] includes about 2430 conversations averaging 6 minutes in length; in other terms, over 240 hours of recorded speech, and about 3 million words of text, spoken by over 500 speakers of both sexes from every major dialect of American English”
Quite a number of researchers working on minority and endangered languages have also used phones to make calls from their offices or homes to their consultants in the field to collect data and/or check data and analyses. I recall Frank Wordick, author of The Yindjibarndi language [published 1977 by Pacific Linguistics, C-71 — for more on Yindjibarndi go here], saying in the mid-1970’s that he spent many hours calling his main consultants in Roebourne when he was back in Canberra following fieldwork in order to check aspects of his data. He even suggested he found it easier to distinguish retroflexes on the phone compared to face-to-face.
Spreading the word
At the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) conference held at the University of Essex last week, there was a discussion session with Professor Shearer West, recently appointed Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). During the discussion she emphasised that “knowledge transfer” is now an essential expectation of all AHRC grant applications, where “knowledge transfer” means “ensur[ing] that the research we fund can be used to make a difference beyond academia”. Apparently the AHRC feels that researchers in Arts and Humanities in the UK have been traditionally rather poor at disseminating their knowledge outside the ivy towers and wants to push them more in this direction. Specifically, this includes:
- promot[ing] the interests of arts and humanities research and its value to our social, economic and cultural life
- increas[ing] the amount of high quality research supporting special exhibitions, resdisplays and conservation
Glossed texts — the fiddle factor
In a recent blog post, Jane Simpson reported on opinions expressed by a group at ANU meeting to discuss grammar writing:
“We all agree it’s a good thing to publish glossed texts so that readers can check out the hypotheses proposed in the grammar, and expressed by the glossing.”
I’d like to inject a note of caution here. It seems to me that many times published texts, with interlinear glossing or not, and especially those that derive from transcriptions of spoken language, have often been fiddled with (or to put it more politely ‘edited’) on their way from recording to printed page. This is also often true of published texts that are based on written originals produced by literate native speakers. It is rarely the case that, as Wamut commented about Jeffrey Heath’s work on Ngandi at the end of Jane’s blog post:
“What is especially great, is that when you go back to Heath’s archived field recordings, the spoken texts are there in pristine form, that is, the spoken text and written text correlate perfectly” [emphasis added]
Heath adopted the same principle of “perfect correlation” in his published work on other languages such as his 1980 Nunggubuyu Myths and Ethnographic Texts which clearly states in the introduction: “in the texts presented here I have not ‘weeded out’ false starts, intrusive English words, or grammatical errors by the narrators”.
In many other cases of text publication, I know editing has taken place — I have done it myself, and some other researchers have admitted to it (though rarely indicating exactly what editorial changes were made — more on this below). The texts in my 1997 book of Texts in the Mantharta Languages, Western Australia. [Tokyo: ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies] were heavily edited, though I didn’t mention that in print at the time, and it was only when it came to creating a multimedia Jiwarli website where both published texts and original recordings were presented that I had to confess: “[y]ou may also notice that the Jiwarli texts are not word for word identical to the sound files, as Jack Butler, after recording the stories, made his own corrections in the texts”. There was no attempt to deceive here, rather it was Jack’s explicit wish that the stories be edited for publication.
As an example, consider published Text 50 (which appears on the website here) and the way it corresponds to the original recording (italics indicates material on the tape which was deleted in the editing process, bold indicates text added during editing, and { x == y} indicates substitution during editing):
Top 10 Endangered Languages
After some delay due to a backlog of other “Top 10s”, my promised article entitled Top 10 Endangered Languages appeared on the Guardian website on Tuesday last week. It has been attracting some attention and comment. Several things seem to have happened to the article in the blogosphere:
- the content was copied whole (with citation) by a number of bloggers – here, here
- only part of the content attracted the attention of some bloggers, eg. Ainu here and here, Ket here, Yuchi here, the loss of cultural heritage here and the parameters I adopted to help me choose here
- Claire Bowern was prompted to come up with her own list of Top 10 endangered languages on her Anggarrgoon blog
- David Crystal mentioned it on his blog which resulted in a comment linking to Claire’s list, and a snappy commentary on Claire’s choice of Mapundungun as an endangered language
- it was listed on Deliggit.com, which claims to track “the social sites most interesting urls”
- it was dug (digged?) on Digg, with 1059 diggs and 154 comments so far. It is currently on the first page of Digg, which is apparently a cool place to be.
Endangered Swans
I took a couple of weeks off recently for my summer holidays during which I started reading an “airport book” (picked up at W.H. Smith’s in the new Heathrow Terminal 5 under one of those ubiquitous “buy one get one half price” deals also offered by Waterstones, Blackwells and Borders throughout the UK — even my local Tesco supermarket offers 50% discount on trade paperbacks). It is called The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Penguin Books, 2007), and what attracted me to shell out my 6 pounds (sorry, readers in Australia) was the subtitle The Impact of the Highly Improbable and the blurb:
“This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge: they’re nearly impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalise them.”
Mobile phone dictionaries
I am down in Adelaide at the moment delivering the Kaurna electronic dictionaries we’ve been working on to the Kaurna Warra Pintyandi group. We’ve produced a Kirrkirr Kaurna dictionary and a mobile phone Kaurna dictionary, based on the work of the 19th century German missionaries Christian Teichelmann and Clamor Schürmann. Both dictionaries were well received. The mobile phone dictionary seemed to be particularly well received by the young people, but I guess we can really appreciate these things. I’ve put up a demonstration version of the dictionary for download so that a wider audience can try it out. I’ve also put up information about how the dictionary works and provided the source code and instructions on how to port other dictionaries into the program.
Top of the Pops
The Books section of the website of The Guardian newspaper here in the UK has a feature they call Top 10s. These are lists prepared by a prominent author featuring their pick of the top 10 items within a topic area, one usually connected to the publication of one of their books. There are the kinds of lists you might expect, like Sarah Anderson’s Top 10 books about wilderness, or Alison MacLeod’s top 10 short stories. But there are also cute ones like Simon Critchley’s top 10 philosophers’ deaths (would linguists’ deaths be quite so interesting?).
In connection with the recent publication of the book I edited called 1000 Languages, The Guardian asked me to prepare a Top 10 endangered languages list. “Great”, I thought, “given my interest in communicating about our work, here’s a way to reach thousands of Guardian readers and others and get them interested in what we do as linguists, as well as highlight some issues about endangered languages. But how do you pick 10 languages out of a potential list of 3,000 (or over 6,000 if Michael Krauss is to be believed?)”
It was an impossible task, so I figured I’d set some parameters and see what I came up with. I decided on the following rules of thumb: