Endangered Languages Week 2013

Posted on 30 April, 2013 by Peter

Endangered Languages Week 2013 will be held at SOAS, University of London, from 20th to 28th May and will include a variety of workshops, talks, films, demonstrations, a debate, and more. Events include:

  • ELDP workshop on technology and African languages
  • APLL6 conference on Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics
  • Talks and seminars:
    • Caroline Kerfoot (Stockholm University): ‘Multilingualism as epistemic resource: rethinking ‘languages’ in educational policy’
    • Kearsey Cormier (DCAL, University College London) on Sign languages
    • Henrik Bergqvist (Stockholm University):‘The problem of accounting for TAME and related expressions in the context of language documentation and description’
    • Catherine Ingram (Music, SOAS) on music and language documentation
    • Sarah Ogilvie (Amazon Corporation) on web technologies and endangered languages
    • Peter Austin (SOAS): ‘And still they speak Dieri. Language revitalisation in northern South Australia’
  • ELAR Open Day, including:
    • Archive demonstration
    • High school students’ debate on language endangerment (with Language Landscape)
    • Dawes manuscript & digitisation demonstration (with SOAS Library Special Collections)
    • Display of historical recording equipment
    • Tibetan scripts & ELAR collections demonstration
    • ELAR Quiz
  • Film Day: films on/in endangered languages

The full programme of events will appear here soon.

All events are free of charge and open to anyone who is interested in languages.

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LDD 11 now available at discount price

Posted on 5 March, 2013 by Peter

The latest issue of Language Documentation and Description, Volume 11, is now available for order from the SOAS online store at 25% off until the end of March. All other back issues of LDD are also available at 25% off and the full set of LDD Volumes 1 to 11 can be purchased for GBP 100, a saving of 38%.

LDD 11 features papers dealing with several topics in language documentation:

  • community-based research in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Aslian languages
  • Sasak verb morphology

The volume will be of interest to anyone concerned with documenting and describing languages, and the application of language documentation principles within communities. In addition, Geoffrey Benjamin’s extended account of the state-of-the-art in documentation and description of Aslian languages will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about this fascinating sub-group of Mon-Khmer languages.

The editors’ introduction to the volume is available for free download.

Posted in Language documentation, Publishing | Comments Off

LDLT4 conference

Posted on 3 March, 2013 by Peter

The Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory biennial conference aims to bring together researchers working on linguistic theory and language documentation and description, with a particular focus on innovative work on under-described or endangered languages. This year the event will also celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Department of Linguistics at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

The main conference session will be held from 7 to 8 December 2013.

Plenary speakers

The plenary speakers for the main conference session are:

Professor Farrell Ackerman, University of California, San Diego
Professor Eva Schultze-Berndt, University of Manchester

Conference theme

The theme of the LDLT4 conference is ‘Linguistic typology and language documentation’. We invite contributions relating to any aspect of the study of language and linguistics from any perspective, including:

  • formal theoretical issues
  • linguistic typology
  • documentary linguistics and responses to language endangerment
  • new techniques and opportunities for documenting and describing languages
  • historical linguistics
  • discourse, and narrative structure

The best contributions will use empirical data to examine the relationship between language documentation and description and linguistic theory.

For more information, including how to submit an abstract go to the conference website

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ELAR users

Posted on 28 February, 2013 by Peter

The number of people actively using materials in ELAR continues to grow with new user registrations increasing by roughly one per day on average (26 in January, 30 in February). Over the last couple of months, almost one third of these new registrations have been from people who identify as language community members, while the remainder tell us they are linguists, researchers, students, or have other interests.

What is clear is that quite a number of users are members of endangered language communities, and some describe themselves both as researchers and as community members, as the following quotes from registrations during January this year indicate:

“I am currently documenting a critically endangered language in my native community.”

“I am interested in Chatino Language. I am a speaker of Chatino and as well a researcher.”

“I am a linguist researching on an endangered language which is also my mother tongue.”

A number of users state that they are interested in accessing materials for language revitalisation purposes:

“We are part of the endangered languages and we as a community are trying to revive and revitalize our dying [language], we have already taken steps to ensure the continuation of our language which is so important to all members of our community.”

“I live on the Rosebud Reservation and have worked in helping to rejuvenate the Lakota Language. I have been a volunteer contributor working with the Lakota Language Consortium. I have done some translation work for them and worked in proofreading Lakota language materials used in the Schools on the Rosebud, Pine Ridge and Standing Rock Reservations.”

Other registered users have different interests in accessing ELAR materials:

“I develop endangered language revival software and mobile apps since about 1996.”

“I founded and chair a non profit and we are focusing on language this year. I will be working on Unangam Tunuu”

And finally, there are people who have more personal interests in the materials available in ELAR:

“I am a visual artist with a background in Social Anthropology. I am currently working on a PhD proposal and would like to use the archive to assist in my research.”

“Lived with the Waorani (1980-1) and wrote a book on them.”

This array of interests and backgrounds expressed by people who registered with ELAR in January 2013 is quite typical, and similar quotations from applications could be provided for other time periods. It is encouraging that ELAR is attracting increasing numbers of users from such diverse backgrounds and with such a varied set of interests. It is also evidence that ELAR’s approach to archiving is achieving its goals of attracting and serving a wide range of users, especially language community members.

Posted in Archiving, ELAR collections | 2 Comments

Curator’s corner: New collections received in January 2013

Posted on 28 January, 2013 by Kakia

January saw the ELAR team literally and metaphorically snowed under with loads of exciting collections coming in and has been working really hard with a view to a snow-covered Russell Square (and some very creative uses of trash bins) to make them available to our users.

Creative uses of a Camden Council trash bin

Creative uses of a Camden Council trash bin!

Snowed under in Russell Square, SOAS, London (Jan 2013)

Snowed under in Russell Square, SOAS, London (Jan 2013)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are very excited to have received data for the following new collections:

  1. Kyitu (Siti) Language Archive (Jonathan BRINDLE, ELDP grant SG0120)
  2. Documentation of Kubeo (Thiago CHACON, ELDP grant SG0038)
  3. Koasati and Language Practices of the Coushatta Tribe  (Stephanie HASSELBACHER, ELDP grant IGS0138)
  4. Documentation of Ayt Atta Tamazight (Simone MAURI, independent researcher)
  5. Malaccan Portuguese Creole: A Portuguese-based Creole (Stephanie PILLAI, ELDP grant SG0138)
  6. Culturally informed corpus of Dalabon (Maia PONSONNET, ELDP grant IGS0125)
  7. Documenting traditional agricultural songs and stories of the Sumi Nagas (Amos TEO, ELDP grant SG0119)

ELAR was also pleased to receive the following updates to collections we already hold:

  1. The painter’s eye, the painter’s voice: language, art and landscape in the Gija world (Frances KOFOD, ELDP grant MDP0190)
  2. Documentation of the moribund language Mmani, a Southern Atlantic language of Niger-Congo (Tucker CHILDS and Jedd SCHROCK, ELDP grant MDP0085)
  3. Ingrian narratives recorded in 2011 by Fedor Rozhanskiy and Elena Markus (Fedor ROZHANSKIY and Elena MARKUS, ELDP grant MDP 0211)
  4. Ingrian, Votic, and Ingrian Finnish elicitations and conversations recorded by Mehmet Muslimov (Fedor ROZHANSKIY and Elena MARKUS, ELDP grant MDP 0211)
  5. Ingrian narratives and elicitations recorded by Ilya Nikolaev in 1996-2002 (Fedor ROZHANSKIY and Elena MARKUS, ELDP grant MDP 0211)

The ELAR team will be working on data conditioning the collections in the next few weeks and we will be further in touch with depositors with comments or questions, before we proceed with adding the relevant metadata, making them easier to browse and search. As these collections are work-in-progress, you can expect these collection pages to change with more information about the data and the fieldwork conducted as ELAR staff and depositors update them.

Many thanks to all our depositors for their hard work!

 

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