Following on from Jane’s announcement during the week of all the great news regarding successful grant applications, I have another bit of good news to share: James McElvenny and I recently applied for, and even more recently received, a grant from a philanthropic foundation to support our current work in compiling dictionaries.
Fieldwork
FollowRoad Testing the Nagra Ares BB+ – Ana Kondic
[from Ana Kondic at the University of Sydney]
I have just spent eight months doing field work in Mexico where I used a Nagra Aress BB+ (with a Sony ECM-MS 957 Microphone) for audio recording that I borrowed from PARADISEC at Sydney University.
I worked with a highly endangered Mayan language, South Eastern Huastec. It is spoken in the region of La Huasteca, in the municipality of Chontla, in the North of Veracruz, Mexico, where the majority of the population speaks this as their first language, alongside Spanish.
The area of la Huasteca is tropical, with high temperatures and a very high humidity. I chose the “cold” period from October to May, with pleasant months of December and January (about 20 C during the day, and gets to low 5 C or so during the night), but very warm April and May (up to 35 C). The humidity is very high all year, mostly 85-95%.
Heard 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:
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.
Volunteer work in Vanuatu – Jeremy Hammond
[from Jeremy Hammond, who’s writing a grammar of Whitesands]
I was standing at the airport on Sunday night as you do, when I bumped into the director of Ausaid services in Vanuatu. One of the big things that they are doing this year is allowing volunteers to go and stay for long periods on outer islands. For linguists this means access to remote communities and languages that have had little work done on them.
Having just come back from living on an outer Island in Vanuatu I can strongly recommend going there to do work. Plenty of pluses; it is close and accessible to Australia/NZ so you will get plenty of visitors (if you want), the people are super friendly and the environment (outside of Vila) is not yet spoiled.
Languages there are changing very quickly (like elsewhere) but the kids still mainly learn a vernacular until about 5 years old and in general there is a strong attachment to their language, identity and culture. But change can happen quickly and who wants to lose more indigenous knowledge.
Anyway I was alerted to this position at the Malakula Kaljorol Senta (MKS) , who are looking for a resident cultural officer to particularly look after vernacular development (for 2 years).
So where do you get the dosh from?
On 28th and 29th February 2008 the CASTL,The Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics, at the Universitetet i Tromsø organised a Workshop om dokumentasjon og revitalisering av samiske språk “Workshop on documentation and revitalisation of Saami languages”. The workshop was attended by 52 people from nine countries, including Canada, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Russia, and all the Nordic countries, and brought together researchers and Saami scholars to create a network to support current and future work on documentation and revitalisation of all varieties of Saami.
I was invited to the workshop to talk about HRELP, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, including the training, archiving and granting work that the three components of HRELP are concerned with. Following my presentation, and in the general discussion session on Friday afternoon, there was a great deal of talk about how to apply for funds to support endangered languages work and to set up research networks (a topic also covered in the Training Course David Nathan and I ran in Japan that I blogged about here).
There are three main competitive funding sources that researchers and communities can apply to for funding:
- General research grant bodies for the Humanities and Social Sciences set up by governments, such as the UK AHRC and SSRC, Australian ARC, Norwegian Forskingsrådet, German DFG and so on;
- Non-government grant bodies such as Unesco, the Christensen Fund, the Endangered Archives Programme sponsored by Arcadia and managed by the British Library (this funds archival work which can include endangered languages materials)
and so on; - Endangered languages grant bodies which deal with research on endangered languages only, such as:
- DoBeS project of the Volkswagen Foundation
- ELDP Endangered Languages Documentation Programme sponsored by Arcadia.
- DEL interagency programme of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities
- FEL Foundation for Endangered Languages
- ELF Endangered Languages Fund
- GBS, Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen, whose current call for grant proposals is available in English here [pdf].
I will refer to the second group as “NGO grant bodies”, and the last group as “EL grant bodies” below. Note that I am not discussing other funding sources that may be used to support language work such as local employment creation projects; these are usually specific to particular places and it is difficult to generalise about them.
Taking our show on the road
Last week David Nathan and I ran a Language Documentation Workshop at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies at the invitation of Toshihide (‘Toshi’) Nakayama, Associate Professor at ILCAA, the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, and author of Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) Morphosyntax among other publications. The workshop was attended by 18 graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from various Japanese universities from Sapporo to Kyoto, most of whom had already done some fieldwork. The attendees were remarkable for several reasons:
- they all showed an amazing level of commitment to language documentation and fieldwork. Roughly half of them had bought recording equipment (Edirol R-9 was a favourite) with their own money – hard to imagine UK students coughing up the equivalent of 30,000 yen for their own machine. They mostly paid for fieldwork costs themselves;
- they were working on a wide array of languages, from Alutor (Siberia), to Amdo Tibetan (China) to Bunun (Taiwan) to Dom (Papua New Guinea) to Cherokee (USA), requiring knowledge of contact languages as varied as Russian, Chinese and French (as well as English);
- many of them endure tough conditions getting to and from the field – one student, for example, works in Siberia and it can take her three weeks to get to her field site. The journey involves three plane trips, and local flights in Russia can only be booked a maximum of three days in advance and are frequently cancelled or rescheduled so for each leg of the journey days of waiting to buy a ticket can be involved;
- they receive little support and training from their home institutions – almost none had taken a field methods course, and none had received training in research methods, tools or workflows (apart from workshops Toshi has been running recently on software tools like Toolbox). When asked how they selected their field sites, one student told us his professor had said genkisoo ni mieru kara papua nyuuginea ni itte kure “since you look healthy go to Papua New Guinea” – he went to the University of Papua New Guinea, befriended a student from the highlands and ended up working on his language!
- they willingly shared samples of their data and analysis with us;
- they were very interested to learn and fully participated in the course until 6pm each day. Exhausting for us but great for them!
Seeking permission
A blog reader writes:
I am continuing at a painfully slow pace to try to organize old field notes on Language L. [..] I have recordings [from the 1960s]. Some are just word lists of no great significance now. However, others are stories of various kinds and I wonder about reproducing them at least in printed form. My question is about the need to obtain permission from the speaker. I know some speakers have died; some are still alive; others I have no idea about and making contact will be difficult. [But someone is hopefully willing to help]. I have read about the general question of rights but am not sure what is generally considered best practice.
So, at least for people I know are alive and I think I can contact and get a response from, is there a form you can recommend which I could use to obtain permission to reproduce in print the stories they recorded? Does your department have guidelines for this sort of thing?
The only people I am likely to be able to contact have sufficiently good English to know what they are signing. However, for some of the people I recorded a Language L version would be more appropriate, which then brings up the problem of creating such a document in L.
Few speakers currently have web access, although that could change quickly. For example, the number of mobile phones in villages was generally fairly limited until a few months ago. Now it seems that, due to a new phone company arriving in PNG, many people in the village of 3,000 plus people have them. And the phones are used a lot for intra-village communication. It would only take a drop in the current high price of internet access and the arrival of cheaper computers for a similar big change to occur.
The perils of fieldwork
We have a number of PhD students at SOAS who are working on languages spoken in the Pacific, including the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. In addition to the usual hazards of fieldwork like biting animals, malaria and other tropical diseases, and the occasional tsunami our students now have another thing to watch out for: Australian immigration officials. All of them have to stop over in Australia on their way to the field and if the recent experiences of one student (I’ll call him “AB” for convenience, mindful of the fact that he has to go through Sydney on his way back to London) are anything to go by, the apparent fear and paranoia that is present on entry to Australia is yet another fieldwork hassle.
The student concerned is of Greek descent, born in Romania and officially registered with a Romanian name (as required by that country, which, along with a number of others, demands that minorities take names that conform to the style of the majority population). The circumstances of his birth led to a problem when he got to Sydney.
NGO model of cultivated self-promotion for activism – Lise Dobrin
[From Lise Dobrin, our correspondent in Virginia]
The media blitz on David Harrison and Greg Anderson’s recent Expedition to a Hot Spot has given everyone (including my mother!) a chance to reflect on what endangered language work really ought to be about. We shouldn’t be parachuting in and out. We should be putting our money into *real* documentation, not demo documentation. We shouldn’t be putting money into documentation at all, but into community revitalization programs (see Ellen Lutz’s 24-9-07 letter in the NYTimes). We should be working to better use the press. No, we should become the press!
But what I find most remarkable about the whole story is this: a couple of linguists start a non-profit to further their own language documentation work. What? Since when do we do that? You can argue the finer points of Greg and David’s methods, or who is (or ought to be) reaping the benefits, but irregardless, their model is an interesting one: if you want to do something that the academic/big agency funding model is not ideally suited to support, nothing is stopping you from creating an institution and doing it on your own instead. The university is not the only possible institutional setting for our work, and it may not always be the best one. It’s just the one many of us are used to.