FollowRuth Singer recaps some of the interesting points of last night’s Linguistics in the Pub, an informal gathering of linguists and language activists that is held monthly in Melbourne
The announcement for this month’s Linguistics in the Pub outlined the topic as follows:
“There is much discussion of best practice in language documentation but as we all know, no language documentation project is perfect: each is the result of collaboration between researchers and a community with restrictions on time, money and many unforeseen circumstances. There is always a gap between what we achieve and the most wonderful project of our dreams.
Come and tell us about your experiences. What aspects of your language documentation work are you most proud of? What will you do differently next time? And what are some of the great things you have planned that you just couldn’t get off the ground?”
The idea behind this discussion topic is that language documentation projects tend to aim high and this can result in those leading language documentation projects feeling disappointed. Spurred on by hearing about innovative projects, egged on by others in the language documentation field to follow best practice in an increasingly multiplying number of areas we sit at our computer concocting new language documentation projects that will create years of recordings, miles of transcripts and beautiful metadata as well as lovely outputs that suit the needs of the language speaker community. In the process we will develop wondrous collaborations with language speakers supporting them to develop the capacity to carry out language documentation work themselves and also meaningful collaborations with other academics such as musicologists, anthropologists and ethnobiologists.