This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has two articles by Peter Monaghan on endangered languages issues. The first is entitled Languages on Life Support: Linguists debate their role in saving the world’s endangered tongues (viewable free on line, and includes material from interviews with Nick Evans, Michael Krauss, Richard Rhodes, Noam Chomsky, and myself. Some of the topics covered will be familiar to readers of this blog, like what Monaghan calls “a ‘commando style’ of recording trip” (something Jane wrote about as Fifo (fly in fly out) fieldwork).
Linguistics
FollowSend a letter to a Minister – Ngapartji Ngapartji
[From Alex Kelly, Ngapartji Ngapartji and BIGhART] Dear friends and supporters, After 5 years working on Ngapartji Ngapartji, building the language website [and see blogpost] and touring the show, we have the opportunity to engage with the people who can help move the issue of Indigenous languages forward in leaps and bounds. Currently, without any … Read more
EuroBABEL projects announced
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:
Report – First International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation – Nick Thieberger
[from Nick Thieberger] The 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) was held in Honolulu from March 12-14th this year. With a theme of “supporting small languages together” the emphasis was on collaborations, between linguists and speakers, and between linguistics and other disciplines. Over 300 people attended the conference with over 150 presentations … Read more
Three recent events
The first few weeks of semester have been a game of snakes and ladders, and I’ve tumbled down some very long snakes. So it’s good to report on a few ladders.
First was the Kioloa Australian Languages Workshop, of which more below.
Then there was the launch of Gayarragi Winangali, an electronic version of the Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay Yuwaalayaay Dictionary at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. It’s a wonderful resource which features a lot of data, a lot of sound, and a lot of ways of accessing the data. (Not to be compared with the expensively produced Multilocus Indigenous language CDs, most of which are depressingly data-light…).
And finally, ANU ePress have republished The Land is a map, a collection of papers on place-names in Australian Indigenous speech communities. (Bizarrely and sadly, they had to scan the book because their predecessor, Pandanus Press, wasn’t into digital archiving).
Report on EL Week 2009
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”
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:
Call for papers: FEL XIII: Endangered Languages and History
The Foundation for Endangered Languqages is holding its thirteenth annual conference this year in Tajikistan, in association with the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan and The Institute of Humanities, Khorog.
Place: Institute of Humanities, Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, Khorog Tajikistan
Dates: 24-26 September, 2009
Abstract deadline: March 1, 2009
The languages of the conference: English, Russian and Tajik. Abstract and papers will be accepted in any of these languages. Go to the conference website for further information. But I’ve put the conference themes below in full, because they make one think about history in a serious and interesting way.
Endangered Languages Week 2009
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:
Beliefs and Ideology on Endangered Languages
On 27th and 28th February we will be running a workshop at SOAS in London to discuss theoretical and practical issues concerning beliefs and ideologies on endangered languages, with a special focus on the implications they have for language support and revitalisation.
Language ideologies have been described by Jan Blommaert as ‘socioculturally motivated ideas, perceptions and expectations of language, manifested in all sorts of language use’. He goes on to suggest that ‘there is now a widespread recognition of language ideologies as a crucial topic of debate when it comes to assessing the motives and causes for certain types of language change’. The study of language ideologies and beliefs may therefore provide insights into the reasons for language shift and/or revival, and may help to determine the success or otherwise of language revitalisation projects. At the workshop we will be looking at several issues: