Transient Languages & Cultures

In a few weeks' time reports and powerpoints on the ELIIP workshop will be up on the ELIIP website for discussion.

I took away memories of the beauty of the mountains and saltlakes, the strange comfortableness of bison, and a slight increase in knowledge about the Latter Day Saints - how can one not feel sympathetic to the nineteenth century Welsh Mormon who set sail for Zion equipped with an English and Welsh dictionary.

There’s a lively group of people at the University of Utah working on native American languages (from Brazil north to Ojibway). One project that especially struck me was a Shoshone outreach program. Several Shoshone were at the ELIIP workshop. Last year 10 Shoshone high school students came to the Center for a six week summer camp funded by a donation from a local mining company. In the program they learned some Shoshone language, as well as crafts from Shoshone elders. The students worked as paid interns to do some work on language documentation and prepare language learning material in Shoshone. It was a great introduction, not only to language documentation but to university life generally. What a good idea!]

Back to the workshop. Yes we need something like ELIIP - a list of endangered languages with information about them and pointers to other sources about them. But it won't work unless it is aimed at more than just linguists. And it must point to rich information. And it must be inclusive. And it must be simple to use. And, since there is very little money around, it must be designed to have as low maintenance costs as possible.

Summing up, I’d say the workshop allowed various ideas to gel about what the one-stop shop for languages would look like. I thought the most important were:

• Avoid duplication. A lot of work has already gone into collecting material. Don’t waste it.
• Data-freshness. People will be drawn to the site if they believe that the data is fresh, rich and reliable.
• ...comes at a cost Whatever’s built has to be updatable and maintainable at minimal cost. So maintaining links - even with a web crawler - is beyond many sites
• Buy-in If it’s to work, lots of communities, archives and linguists need to be able to add in material easily and to feel that it belongs to all of us
• Simple interface for searching AND for uploading. This means paying for good design and testing with a range of users. Maybe there’ll be several interfaces for different types of user.
• Wish-things
  • There was a strong swell of opinion in favour of digital archives where people could deposit digital data files and update information easily
  • Snapshots in time People will want to know what a language was like 10 years ago, 20 years ago - how many speakers, did children speak it and so on.
  • Localisation How to translate the material into other languages for countries where outreach on the importance of helping speakers keep their languages is really needed? Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Pidgins and French may be the main lingua francas for some of these areas.

A divide was proposed by Gary Simons between curated web services (where people create data and people manage that data) - like Wikipedia - and aggregating web services (where automatic harvesters harvest data from archives, libraries etc) - like Google. I think the consensus was that we needed both - linking to information that is out there, and filling in the gaps.http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/metadata.html

[from Margaret Florey]

We are pleased to announce the formation of the Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation(CTLDC). The CTLDC has been established as an international response to the crisis confronting the world's languages by co-Directors Carol Genetti (University of California at Santa Barbara and InField founder) and Margaret Florey (co-founder and co-Director of the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity).

The central aim of the CTLDC is to build a global resource for all those who are actively working to maintain linguistic diversity through fostering collaboration among people who are engaged in training in language documentation and conservation. The CTLDC will provide a critical network to foster communication and collaboration, and enhance the sharing of skills and resources.
An international Planning Group has been established to guide the development of the Consortium. The Planning Group (listed below) comprises representatives of organizations which are at the forefront of supporting linguistic diversity through planning and administering training programs, creating funding strategies to support linguistic diversity, designing tools to provide more accurate data on trends in linguistic diversity, establishing resource networks, and developing and influencing language policy. UNESCO's Intangible Heritage Section has agreed to host the first meeting of the Planning Group in Paris in late 2010. That meeting will allow us to prioritize activities and establish the structure and goals of the Consortium.

Following the 2010 meeting, the CTLDC will open for international membership and will begin to work towards its longer-term goals, to

• construct a clearinghouse of materials accessible to LDC trainers and community members from across the globe,
  
• provide a forum for the sharing of curricula, teaching and assessment strategies, and methods,
  
• facilitate the explicit discussion of the goals and models currently being developed and implemented for training in language documentation and conservation (LDC),
  
• encourage partnerships between trainers of varied backgrounds and experiences,
  
• take into account a wide variety of perspectives and approaches by bringing together instructors from universities, communities, intensive institutes, school-based programs, language centers, and other initiatives,
  
• promote new collaborations, exchange ideas, and support training efforts worldwide,
  
• identify successful practices for LDC education,
  
• establish ethical and other principles to guide practitioners in documentation, conservation, and capacity-building activities,
  
• develop strategies to increase the range of funding opportunities to support LDC training at all levels,
  
• publicize LDC activities and events to raise greater awareness about the importance of linguistic diversity.

This blogpost comes to you from Salt Lake City at the University of Utah, thanks to the Center for American Indian Languages which is co-hosting a Workshop on Endangered Languages Information and Infrastructure (ELIIP) project with Linguist List(organised by Lyle Campbell, Helen Aristar Dry, Anthony Aristar). It's intended mostly for the specialist, but there's an interesting push to reach out to the general public- if they don't understand what we do, they won't support it. Cute and less cute facts help in conveying this - more on this later.

A thousand flowers on endangered languages are blooming on the web, from Wikipedia to blogs on particular languages to the language resources catalogued by libraries. Helen Aristar Dry suggested that users want to view the whole flowerbed from a convenient vantage point. That's the II of ELIIP: do we need a comprehensive catalogue/database/website/portal of endangered languages?

So suppose Jane LUser does a google search on the web for 'Ossetian language'.

I was just sent this from ICTV Limited (Alice Springs) - looks like v good news

Indigenous Community Television Ltd
Showing Our Way MEDIA RELEASE
22 October 2009

ICTV RELAUNCH
Remote Aboriginal Communities to celebrate the return of their Indigenous Community Television service
An official launch of Indigenous Community Television – ICTV – will take place in DJARINDJIN COMMUNITY (200km north of Broome) at 6pm, November 13 2009.

[ from Peter K. Austin, Department of Linguistics, SOAS
24 October 2009]

The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) in the Department of Linguistics at SOAS is seeking to appoint a Programme Director to take responsibility for leadership of the documentation programme. ELDP provides grants to fund projects, fellowships and field trips on a global basis. ELDP is part of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) funded by Arcadia Trust, and is managed by SOAS. Decisions about ELDP grant applications are made by an independent international review panel which typically meets once a year.

The successful applicant will have overall responsibility for ELDP, including:

• strategic planning
  
• day-to-day administration
  
• working with the programme administrator, independent panel chair and panel members
  
• managing the award of grants with a budget of up to £1.5 million each year
  
• maintaining and developing relationships with grant awardees

As part of the mission of HRELP, the successful applicant will be expected to engage in and promote outreach, community-building and training activities in language documentation throughout the world, and to work together with the Director of the Endangered Languages Academic Programme and the Director of the Endangered Languages Archive.

The position is for a fixed term until September 2016, starting in summer 2010, no later than September 2010. The salary range is £47,064 - £54,086 p.a. inclusive of London Allowance, and the closing date for applications is 7 December 2009 (SOAS Vacancy 000107).

Enquiries about the position may be made to the Interim Programme Director, Peter Sells (sells @ soas.ac.uk). For further information see the ELDP job web page, and to apply for this vacancy or download a job description, please use this direct link or visit SOAS Jobs. Interviews are provisionally scheduled for the week of 18 January 2010.

SOAS values diversity and aims to be an equal opportunities employer.†

[From our man, temporarily in India, Peter K. Austin, Department of Linguistics, SOAS]
23 October 2009

Last January I wrote a blog post about how Facebook is being used in various ways to present and document endangered languages.

My former student and colleague Domenyk Eades of Sultan Qaboos University, Oman, has just written to tell me about another use of Facebook, this time by speakers of Gayo, an endangered language spoken in Aceh, Indonesia. Domenyk did his PhD research on Gayo and published a grammar of it. He writes:

I recently found that there is a large group of Gayo people who are communicating on Facebook in their language, many of them have a rudimentary command of the language. Some university students from Takengon have a project called "Kamus Gayo Bergambar" (illustrated Gayo dictionary). Every day they send out a photograph and a list of about 5-8 Gayo words and their Indonesian equivalents. The Gayo Facebook friends of the dictionary, who live in Gayo and elsewhere in Indonesia, read and comment on the words. There have been some good discussions on the different words. At the moment the spelling of the words is a problem, and I have been trying to get them to use the orthography I developed in my PhD study. It is very interesting to see the enthusiasm. I can't remember anything like it when I was doing my study of the language.

The Gayo dictionary Facebook Group is here (requires membership of Facebook to view). There is a map of Takengon and the Gayo area here and English language blogs developed by Gayo speakers here and here.

Peter K. Austin
Department of Linguistics, SOAS
18 October 2009

On Tuesday 6th October at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Sorosoro Project of Fondation Chirac held a press conference and launch of their new website (currently only available in French but with English and Spanish versions in the works). The launch was hosted by Rozenn Milin, Director of the Sorosoro project, and attended by ex-president Jacques Chirac, who gave a thoughtful speech about the need to preserve and support linguistic and cultural diversity.

Peter K. Austin
Department of Linguistics, SOAS
17 October 2009

The Department of Linguistics at SOAS and the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies are jointly organising a workshop on teaching linguistic fieldwork and sustainability on Friday 4th December 2009. The workshop is intended for both experienced and novice lecturers and students of Field Linguistics, and will introduce them to knowledge and skills from a wide range of areas in linguistic theory and practice, with a focus on learning about "real world" language problems and solutions.

The workshop is aimed at students interested in learning more about fieldwork, and staff who are considering how fieldwork might fit into the linguistics curriculum. There will be two strands – one for beginners who are interested but have no experience of fieldwork, and one for advanced who have some fieldwork experience or have participated in a field methods course. For beginners, we will cover a range of fieldwork types, including language documentation and urban sociolinguistic fieldwork. For the advanced group topics will include language and culture documentation, sustainable documentation methods and phonetic fieldwork.

Presentations will be given by staff and post-graduate students from SOAS, Queen Mary University, Manchester University and Edinburgh University.

Aidan Wilson went up to Pine Creek and Kybrook Farm in the Northern Territory last week to deliver the various versions of the Wagiman electronic dictionary to the Wagiman community. You can read about it at the Project for Free Electronic Dictionaries blog.

[Media release from Nicholas Ostler, Foundation for Endangered languages]

This year's conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages will take place in the High Pamirs, at Khorog in Tajikistan, on 24-26 September 2009.

The conference will discuss the contribution of Endangered Languages to History and how the study of history can encourage the preservation and promote the revitalisation of endangered languages.

Tajikistan itself, although a small and remote country with a population of 7 million, is home to nine languages, most of them in the mountainous south, the Pamirs. Unlike its surrounding Central Asian countries, where the national languages are Turkic, its primary language is Tajik, a form of Persian. It also shares a long border with Afghanistan, where Dari Persian is also widely spoken.

Conquered by Tsarist Russia in the 1870s as part of the Tournament of Shadows, the "Great Game" played between the British and Russian Empires, Central Asia had its languages re-organized and re-alphabetized in the 1920s and 1930s, all its scripts changing from Arabic to Roman to Russian in the course of 15 years. Nevertheless, this was the basis on which Tajik literacy has leapt from a tiny minority to almost 100 percent. The relative roles of languages, Tajik, Russian, Uzbek, and Yaghnobi and the many languages of the Pamirs, remain a highly charged issue in Tajikistan's policy.

Tajikistan is heir to many peoples who played key roles in ancient struggles between East and West: the Sogdians, great traders of 'heavenly' horses for silk at the courts of China; the Tajiks, who transmitted the fresh news of Muhammad's revelation within Central Asia at the forefront of an invading army, and brought the Persian language with them; the Samanids, who created the first civilization that used New Persian, the poetic culture made familiar in the west by the Rubai'yat of Omar Khayyam, and the Golden Road to Samarkand. As well as being a stage on the Silk Road, it was home to Tamburlaine the Great, whose bloody conquests straddled Asia from Ankara to Delhi, and to Babur, who founded the Mughal dynasty in India. Truly Tajikistan can be called the home of History. And the peoples who speak its surviving languages have seen more than most.

The conference will be held in collaboration with:

• The Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan,
  
• The Institute of Humanities, Khorog, Tajikistan
  
• The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London.

Conference delegates will also visit the Ishkashimi language community in the Badakhshan region of the country. Badakhshan was long famous as a source of rubies, emeralds and lapis lazuli.

Further details of the conference can be found at the FEL website. Or contact Nicholas Ostler,
Chairman, Foundation for Endangered Languages
Registered Charity: England & Wales 1070616 nostler AT chibcha.demon.co.uk