Things move fast in the endangered languages world. Five years is a long time, especially the past five years when so much has happened. Last speakers of languages have passed away, such as the late Marie Smith Jones who was the last speaker of Eyak and who died on 21st January 2008 (her death garnered much publicity as signalling the first native Alaskan language to become extinct — a Google search of “last speaker of Eyak”, for example, returns 537 hits, led by such big names as the BBC, the Economist and so on). Other less publicised losses have occurred, such as Jawoyn from the Northern Territory, whose last fluent speaker died in July 2007.
But really good stuff has happened in the last five years too: millions of dollars of research funds have been made available for work with endangered languages through the Volkswagen Foundation’s DoBeS project, the NSF-NEH DEL scheme, and the ELDP grants administered by SOAS. There have been lots of grass roots activities to document, archive and support endangered languages, and a whole new group of committed students have entered the field via training programmes at ELAP at SOAS and University of Hawaii, among others. There have been summer schools, like the 2004 DoBeS summer school in Frankfurt, with more on the way including the 3L summer school and InField summer institute starting in June this year. If you add in the conferences, workshops, training courses, books, articles, media coverage, blogs and so on it is pretty clear that endangered languages has become a really hot issue, especially since 2003 or so.
Courtesy of the KITLV Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies I have just received a copy of Encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages edited by Christopher Moseley and started dipping into it. I am writing a proper review of the book for the BKI Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, but thought I would share some initial impressions here.
Linguistics
FollowThe times they are a changin’
At the Australian Languages Workshop 2008 held in March at the ANU field station at Kioloa (recounted in Jane Simpson’s blog post) there was an after-dinner quiz organised by Harold Koch. It consisted of a series of trivial pursuit style questions to identify scholars who had published on Australian Aboriginal languages (some recent, some not so recent). The questions went something like this (some of these are ones I remember from Harold’s quiz, others I have made up):
Identify the following six people each of whom published on Australian Aboriginal languages and:
- also wrote a book on scurvy in sheep
- published on middle-Indo-Aryan under another name
- prepared a handbook for coroners
- was a jackaroo on a station in the north-west of Western Australia
- is an expert in Ergodic Theory and has published a book on Multidimensional Continued Fractions
- spent time in an Australian internment camp as a Nazi spy during the second world war
The answers to most of these questions are to be found in a new 526 page book published this month by Pacific Linguistics and edited by William B. McGregor entitled Encountering Aboriginal languages: Studies in the history of Australian linguistics. My copy just arrived in London and I am having trouble putting it down, the contents are so interesting.
5th European Australianist workshop – Eva Schultze-Berndt
[from our woman in Kununurra, Eva Schultze-Berndt]
This email is a call for expressions of interest in a 5th European Australianist workshop, to be held at the University of Manchester in September 2008.
The suggestions for dates are either of the following:
a) Su/Mo, 14th/15th September. This is adjacent to the LAGB conference in Colchester/Essex from 10-13 Sept; train travel between Colchester and Manchester is about 5 hrs.
b) Fr/Sat, 19th-20th September.
c) Sat/Su, 20th-21st September.
Of course depending on the number of participants we might only need one day. But hopefully many of you will be able to come!
The suggestion for a workshop theme is “Discourse, prosody and information structure in Australian languages”. As usual, participants would be free to present papers not related to this theme.
I will be able to apply for a very limited amount of funding towards accommodation and travel costs of students or other participants who are not in full-time employment (success not guaranteed of course). Please indicate if you are interested in participating and belong to this category.
Your language footprint
One of the events which featured in Endangered Languages Week 2008 at SOAS was called What is your language footprint?. This concept of a Language Footprint and the ideas behind it were developed by David Nathan, and presented by his team that also included Chaithra Puttaswamy and Juliette Rutherford (Tom Castle created the dramatic poster).
It has since attracted the attention of several bloggers, including Bulanjdjan (Langguj Gel) and Hoyden about town.
The basic concept is simple. A language footprint is the influence of those speaking a dominant language on the behaviour of speakers of other languages. In any communication, if your choice of language makes another person shift from their language to yours, you have made a language footprint. The concept is intended as a metaphor similar to the”carbon footprint”notion and, like it, includes the potential that individuals can reduce or offset their language footprint. You can reduce your language footprint by:
Chirac Foundation sponsors Endangered Languages event
The recently established Fondation Chirac in collaboration with the Musée du quai Branly and Unesco is organising a one-day public event to be held on Monday 9th June in Paris called “SOROSORO pour que vivent les langues du monde!” (SOROSORO long live the languages of the world! ). Sorosoro in the Araki language of Vanuatu means “breath, word, language”. The event will highlight the current situation of language diversity and endangered languages and includes presentations by linguists from France, Gabon, Guatemala, UK and Vanuatu.
The programme begins at 3pm in the Claude Levi-Strauss Theatre at the Museum and includes the following presentations (my translations of the French original):
Indigenous languages – staying in the background
Mirabile dictu… The 2020 summit background material on Indigenous Australia,
Endangered Languages Week 2008
Following on from our successful experiment in April 2007 the Endangered Languages Project at SOAS is running an even bigger and better Endangered Languages Week from 30th April to 8th May 2008.
Through films, displays, discussions and workshops we are presenting what is being done to document, archive and support endangered languages at SOAS and around the world. The theme of the week is “What can WE do?”, exploring how researchers, students, language community members and members of the public can work together to address the challenges of global language and cultural loss.
Activities include:
it’s a comprehensive reference grammar, innit
Last Wednesday, Elizabeth Zeitoun’s recently published Grammar of Mantauran (Rukai) arrived in my mailbox at SOAS from Academic Sinica in Taipei. This is a beautifully produced description of a dialect of Rukai, one of the Endangered Languages of Taiwan and at 551 pages is a sizeable account of the language.
So I got to thinking: this is a pretty impressive comprehensive reference grammar of an endangered language. And then, well what counts as a ‘comprehensive (reference) grammar’? The term gets used quite a bit in relation to endangered and minority languages. For example the February 2007 newsletter [pdf] of La Trobe University’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, the most recent one available, contains over 25 uses of the term, and all 10 PhD students associated with the Centre are said to be writing a ‘comprehensive grammar’ of a small language. A Google search for “comprehensive reference grammar” returns 1,130 hits, and for “comprehensive grammar” 128,000 hits, though that includes things like A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk,Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, which doesn’t really count for our purposes, nor does Matthews and Yip’s Cantonese: A Comprehensive Reference Grammar.
So I then adopted a tried and true sampling method of language typologists, namely have a look at the grammars of smaller languages that are on my book shelves at SOAS and pick the fattest ones (ok, ok, I know real typologists don’t do sampling like this any longer, but bear with me for the purposes of this exercise). What I came up with is summarised in the following table (astute readers will notice that I am not controlling for factors like margin width, page size, font type size and line spacing, but I’m only human):
How to discourage publication in languages other than English
So, the Oz Government wants to ensure that the Oz tax payer gets value for the taxes that pay for me and my colleagues to scuttle and scurry around universities, and our students to read & learn & think & write &..
To this praiseworthy end, each year the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Training ask us to produce copies of everything solid & worthy we’ve published over the previous year with all sorts of verification information, and of course the all important label MADE IN AN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY CONTAINING ALL AUSTRALIAN INGREDIENTS. And the “we” includes not only staff but also students – which is right & proper, except that the students get no direct benefit from the labor of copying and collating the information, whereas a small trickle of money comes back to departments on the basis of their research output.
Now, one of our students* has just published an interesting article on grammaticalisation of a Cantonese particle, in the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Yue dialects (Cheung, H-H; S-H Cheung and H-K Chan (eds) 2007. Dishijie GuoYuefangyan Yantaohui Lunwunji (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press. ISBN 978-7-5004-6582-9). She kindly copied the article, and the preface, the table of contents, and the ISBN publication details page, all of which are needed for verification.
2020 vision (maybe) on Australia’s language capacity
Among the people invited to share ideas at the 2020 Summit on visions for Australia’s future are several speakers of traditional Indigenous Languages, Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan, Raymattja Marika and Thomas Jangala Rice. Apart from them, as far as I can see, linguists haven’t got a look in. Our ideas aren’t part of the vision for Australia. Sigh, so what’s new?
Australia’s language capacity has declined. This includes the capacity to speak the languages of our neighbours, the loss of Australia’s Indigenous language heritage, and the fact that Indigenous children in remote communities are not learning Standard English. Changes in policy are needed to rebuild our ability as a country to learn and use languages. It’d be great if the summit considered this as something to push for.