The Books section of the website of The Guardian newspaper here in the UK has a feature they call Top 10s. These are lists prepared by a prominent author featuring their pick of the top 10 items within a topic area, one usually connected to the publication of one of their books. There are the kinds of lists you might expect, like Sarah Anderson's Top 10 books about wilderness, or Alison MacLeod's top 10 short stories. But there are also cute ones like Simon Critchley's top 10 philosophers' deaths (would linguists' deaths be quite so interesting?).

In connection with the recent publication of the book I edited called 1000 Languages, The Guardian asked me to prepare a Top 10 endangered languages list. "Great", I thought, "given my interest in communicating about our work, here's a way to reach thousands of Guardian readers and others and get them interested in what we do as linguists, as well as highlight some issues about endangered languages. But how do you pick 10 languages out of a potential list of 3,000 (or over 6,000 if Michael Krauss is to be believed?)"

It was an impossible task, so I figured I'd set some parameters and see what I came up with. I decided on the following rules of thumb:

This is a follow up to my posting about materials from the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Web Dictionary and my 1993 book Reference Dictionary of Gamilaraay, northern New South Wales being copied without attribution, repackaged and sold in book form.

The ever vigilant David Nash has brought to my attention this wiki which contains Gamilaraay language materials with English glosses, roughly 100 vocabulary items in all. The site is organised into eight subsections:

• Topics
  
• Adverbs
  
• Interjections
  
• Nouns
  
• Particles
  
• Verbs
  
• Pronouns
  
• Suffixes

Head to Ourimbah, 9-11 December 2008 for for the Directions in Oceanic Research (DOR) conference.

Here's the info:

Moreover, we will soon be celebrating five years of operations, in which case, 2000 hours might not seem so impressive - it's just 400 hours per year after all - but we at Paradisec are very proud of our collection. Especially given that just about everything here is done on a shoestring budget and there have been some lengthy hiatuses of funding lately.

Speaking of which, this may be an opportune time to mention that we are always amenable to generous donations from people wishing to sponsor the digitisation and preservation of a collection of data. See our website for more details.

So, just which file was the lucky 2000th hour? Well, we can't really be sure, but we do know that it was among a collection of Mark Durie's research into the dialects of Aceh, an area that was devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami of Boxing Day 2006.

To help us celebrate both these milestones, Mark has kindly written a small piece for us about Aceh's dialects, his research of them and the importance of preserving the collection. He has also allowed a small portion of one of these recordings to be posted with this piece, which you can download here.

As it approaches the halfway point, the 3L (Leiden-London-Lyon) Summer School on Language Documentation and Description is humming along. It started on Monday 23rd June and ends on Friday 4th July.

So far we have had five days of plenary lectures (in English) and discussions (in English, and French) on a range of topics, practical classes (on phonology, tonology, audio recording, Toolbox, multimedia, applying for research grants -- most available in both English and French), and areal classes (on Cushitic, and Mayan languages). There is a full list [.pdf] of course descriptions on the 3L website. There are around 65 students and researchers attending from a wide range of countries as varied as Togo, Gabon, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Guatemala, USA, Netherlands, Germany, France, Russia, UK, Taiwan and Australia. Teachers are from the University of Lyon-2, SOAS and Leiden. The local organisational team is made up of students and staff from Lyon-2 together with student volunteers.

On Wednesday evening there was a very interesting soirée which brought researchers and students attending the 3L Summer School together with researchers and students attending a summer school on Interactional Linguistics being run by the CNRS ICAR laboratory headed by Professor Lorenza Mondada at the recently opened École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (with brand new architecturally outstanding buildings and facilities). There were many interesting issues of common interest that surfaced in the short presentations given by researchers from the two groups, including problems of fieldwork (entering, being in and leaving the field, the role of gatekeepers and brokers), research methods and tools, and giving back to those participating in the research. There are sure to be more useful interactions between the ICAR and DDL research groups in Lyon in the future.

Today there is a student conference, or rather two conferences since there will be presentations of around 20 papers in two parallel sessions, one in French and one in English. The students are so keen to discuss their work that the programme starts at 9:30am and goes to 7pm (on a Saturday, mind you!). This level of enthusiasm and willingness to share ideas and experiences has been a feature of the past week both in class and outside.

Some other features of the summer school so far that I have noticed include:

I just received copies from the publishers of a new book that may be of interest to readers of this blog. It is called 1000 Languages: The Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues and is edited by yours truly. The book was published by Thames and Hudson in the UK and associated countries, and by University of California Press in the US. It is available on UK Amazon, or readers in the UK can get it for an even cheaper price via the Tesco on-line store.

The book is issued in hard cover and runs to over 300 pages and includes over 400 colour illustrations, a series of maps, a glossary of linguistic terms, and a list of references. It is organised topically by geographical regions and each chapter explores the sources, interrelationships and characteristics of that region's languages, including the major and minor ones of the area. It includes chapters on the topical issues of endangered and extinct languages. Each main entry details numbers of speakers, geographical spread, growth, development and key features of the language. The following is a list of the chapters and authors:

Fueled by tim-tams and orange juice, teams of three worked away at problems in Luiseno, Chinantec, Japanese compounds, the horror [1] of getting computers to parse English morphology, and a wonderful problem on Anglicised Irish place-names - how do you get Clashgortmore from the forms in An Chlais Bhán (The White Pit), Bun an Ghoirt Bháin (Base of the White Field), An Currach Mór (The Big Marsh) - and what does it mean?

They seemed excited, charming, enthusiastic problem-solvers, and, with luck they'll be the next generation of linguists (doctor, lawyer, Indian chief?)

The general consensus seems to be that:

• yes, we must have it next year,
  
• yes if we advertise in further in advance we will get more students (64 was FAR more than we'd expected),
  
• and
  YES, we must find sponsors [2] to send the national winners overseas to the International Computational and Linguistic Olympiads.
  

Suggestions anyone?

And now, to mark the results…

Watch this space for the three winners who will go on to the National round on 6th August.

[1] and the horror of marking - one of our Melbourne collaborators spent today whipping off "a quick and dirty Perl script to evaluate the effectiveness of the regular expressions that the students come up with" in answer to the problem.

[2] Above and beyond our current kind & generous sponsors, HCSNet, the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, Macquarie University, CSIRO, the Australasian Language Technology Association, and the Australian Linguistics Society.

J. Jampin Jones died yesterday. In 1998, as a middle-aged man, after many years of hard manual work, and in the midst of the grief and the havoc wrought by kidney failure on many of his family, he went to Batchelor College to learn to read and write Warumungu. An astonishing thing to do, and his charm, enthusiasm, and undauntedness gave hope and encouragement to other Warumungu students. Those of us studying Warumungu were helped immensely by his gift for explaining meanings, and by his belief that it was a good thing we were doing together.

We honour them both.

The program for the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (Marshallese, Malagasy, Indonesian, Seediq, Samoan...and more), is here.. The program for the Papuan languages workshop is here (One, Fas, Oksapmin...). The program for the International Lexical Functional Grammar Conference is here (Gunwinyguan, Turkish, Sinhala, Welsh..). Other programs include those for the Australian Linguistics Society [.pdf], and for the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia [.xls].

You can find out all about the units on offer for the Australian Linguistics Institute here [.pdf]. Units of particular interest to Transient Languages readers include:

I was standing at the airport on Sunday night as you do, when I bumped into the director of Ausaid services in Vanuatu. One of the big things that they are doing this year is allowing volunteers to go and stay for long periods on outer islands. For linguists this means access to remote communities and languages that have had little work done on them.

Having just come back from living on an outer Island in Vanuatu I can strongly recommend going there to do work. Plenty of pluses; it is close and accessible to Australia/NZ so you will get plenty of visitors (if you want), the people are super friendly and the environment (outside of Vila) is not yet spoiled.

Languages there are changing very quickly (like elsewhere) but the kids still mainly learn a vernacular until about 5 years old and in general there is a strong attachment to their language, identity and culture. But change can happen quickly and who wants to lose more indigenous knowledge.

Anyway I was alerted to this position at the Malakula Kaljorol Senta (MKS) , who are looking for a resident cultural officer to particularly look after vernacular development (for 2 years).

Reviewed by Nick Thieberger, University of Melbourne / University of Hawai'i

This collection of thirteen papers addresses language ideology, in particular the use of 'language endangerment' as a rallying cry with broader 'ideological struggles on the terrain of language'. If I could have done a concordance of the text, I'm sure that tokens including 'discourse' and 'essentialize' would have come out near the top of the frequency list. The use of the former is apparently necessary at least once a page (and preferably more often) and the second is a 'Bad Thing', although I have to say that most authors in this book essentialize linguists and the linguistic project as unproblematic, and not internally fraught in the way that everything else is (although the naivete of this postmodern critique would have one think that only they could consider such a thing to be possible).

Deconstruction is the trope of choice throughout this volume – unfortunately constructive critique is not. A certain amount of critical evaluation of linguists' engagement with endangered languages is necessary, but I find it in general to be dealt with in a heavy-handed and unhelpful way by many of the contributions to this volume.

In this review I will give a brief sketch of the contents of the book which I approached eagerly, keen to read a critical account of the endangered languages (EL) movement in which I have had some interest over almost three decades now. My interest in ELs has focussed on small languages, typically spoken by marginalised groups in what used to be called the fourth world, pre-industrial people living largely traditional lives and, in general these language were not provided with much in the way of resources or existing documentation. This book, on the whole, deals with languages ranging from Corsican to French as endangered in some way and it takes some changing gear in my mind to sympathise with their plight. One chapter deals with indigenous languages (of Canada) but otherwise the volume has a strong European focus (the other exceptions being a chapter on the 'Official English' movement in the USA and another on Acadian French in Nova Scotia).

As I pointed out in a previous post, there have been a lot of new developments in the field of endangered languages research in the past five years. One of those has been the publication series Language Documentation and Description which we produce annually at SOAS. We started the series in 2003 with the launch of HRELP, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (in fact, the first volume contains papers from our launch event and the workshop that followed). Hot off the presses this week is the fifth volume of papers, containing six papers on three topics: data and language documentation, digital video and archiving in language documentation, and training and activism in documentary linguistics. Here is the table of contents (for more details including a downloadable PDF of my Editor's Preface and an order form go here):