Anna Bugaeva: Revitalizing Ainu. A Web-accessible Ainu-Japanese-English Conversational Dictionary Ainu (Northern Japan, isolate) is nearly extinct at present, as only a couple of people aged 80-90 remember their native language. In the beginning of the 20th century, the Ainu (present population about 100,000) experienced severe ethnic and linguistic repression from the state which led to the rapid abandonment of language and its eventual loss by succeeding generations of the Ainu. However, the attitude of many Ainu towards their native culture and language has changed to positive after the official adoption of ãThe Law for the Promotion of the Ainu Culture...? (1997) and the official recognition of the Ainu as the indigenous population of Hokkaido (2008). More and more Ainu are experiencing a new sense of self-identity and becoming aware of the importance of revitalizing their language and culture; 15 Ainu language schools were established. The creation of a web-accessible Ainu-Japanese-English Conversational Dictionary is a part of my ELDP project "Documentation of the Saru Dialect of Ainu" (2007-2009) which generally aims at creating digital corpora of newly and previously recorded Ainu audio materials. Having attended the 11th annual Ainu speech contest (November 2007), I realized that the Ainu community had a very strong demand for Ainu conversational audio recordings, since all previous Ainu documentation was focused on recording folklore. This made me revise my ELDP project to adjust it to the actual needs of the community. I decided to use a rarity "An Ainu-Japanese Conversational Dictionary" (3,847 lexemes/conversational phrases) compiled by anthropologists K. Jinbo and S. Kanazawa in 1898. The dictionary contains 3,847 entries, i.e. conversational phrases or words, and presumably belongs to the Saru dialect. I had the dictionary recorded by a speaker of the Saru dialect, Mrs. Setsu Kurokawa (85) who was either reading Ainu phrases transcribed in the Japanese (katakana) alphabet or repeating them after me. The speaker's productive skills improved so rapidly that she even started improvising on the dictionary. By the end of the grant period, I plan to complete a web-accessible reader-friendly edition of the Ainu conversational dictionary with audio and some video recordings supplemented with katakana transcriptions, English translations and multi-tire annotations. It will consist of a simple search interface that allows the user to enter a string to be found in the dictionary, either in Ainu or Japanese/English. I also intend to publish a paper edition of the dictionary to facilitate its use by those who do not have internet access.
Michael 'Andy' Bowen: Experiencing Mixtec Language through Living Narrative How can archived recordings of spoken narratives be used to achieve the joint goals of learning and maintaining smaller languages? In the presentation/poster, the process of creating listening comprehension materials that attend to both of the above goals will be illustrated using the presenter's experience with the Mixtec speaking community in San Diego. The role of aural input when learning an L2 is seen as a crucial component for developing successful communication skills. However, a body of listening comprehension materials for a smaller language may not be available ahead of written teaching material. Through digital archiving, an opportunity to fill this gap is afforded. With the use of readily available audio technology such as Audacity, Protools, and Garage Band, an increased facility to digitally parse and manipulate a recorded speech stream allows educators to explore subtle aspects of archived texts that may heretofore have lain hidden. Increasing non-Mixtec grad students' ability to process aural language input is an important part of preparing them for the experience of communication in the western region of Oaxaca. With well over 20 variants of Mixtec language spoken in this area, familiarity with a variety of input sources is indicated. Breaking down digitally archived story texts into manageable chunks gives these students the chance to interact with the language in a way that goes beyond what a single native speaker instructor can provide. Many Mixtec immigrants in San Diego find it desirable to cultivate Mixtec language exposure among their pre-teen children. To enable this, texts of traditional Mixtec stories are used in an evening program for children allowing them to hear, write and create with some of the different varieties of Mixtec spoken by their parents. Simultaneously, the parents are involved in a language exchange forum where they teach Mixtec to community volunteers who teach them Spanish or English in return.
Yongheng Cao: The preservation and documentation of the minority languages in China In China, the largest ethnic group, the Han Nationality, comprises 90% of the total population. The rest are 55 minority ethnic groups, taking up about 10% of the population. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Chinese government has invested a lot of money and resources in preserving and documenting the various minority languages. Of particular importance was the success of creating writing scripts for the minority groups that never had their own writing scripts before, which helped them greatly in their daily communication and communication with outside world. There are over 100 minority languages in China, which can be classified into five language families: Sino-Tibetan, Altai, South-Island, South-Asia and Indo-European. In recent years, the large nationwide survey has provided very useful information about the actual use of minority languages in different parts of the country and demographic distribution of the various minority languages. The results show that there are 7 minority languages with a spoken population under 100, 15 minority languages with population between 100 and 1000, 41 minority languages with a population between 1000 and 10,000, 34 minority languages between 10,000 and 100,000, 17 minority languages between 100,000 and 1 million, 10 minority languages between 1 million and 10 million; 2 minority languages over 12 million. Among all the minority languages, 20 are close to extinction, and 3 have already disappeared. In order to preserve and document all the minority languages, especially those that are extinct, the government has passed laws and regulations regarding the protection of these cultural heritage and organized special committee to carry out large scale, detailed project of documentation of the extinct languages. Each year, UNESCO provids funds to help with these language reviving projects. The Academy of Social Sciences in China has also selected experts from related fields and invested a lot of money in these projects. Up till now, the language data of over 30 minority languages have been documented and published. In spite of the above achievements, huge amount of work are still waiting for people to do for the minority languages. At the end of this paper, the author offered some suggestions on what other measures should be taken into account. These include the construction of lexical and phonetic data corpus using modern computer technology, and the preservation and documentation of the tradition arts of these minority groups (e.g. literature, poetry, and drama), etc.
Chun-Mei Chen: Sound Files and the Phonetics-Phonology Interface in Paiwan The paper investigates the Phonetics-Phonology interface of the Paiwan dialects, based on the sound files, under construction voice corpus and the varieties from eight dialects in two counties. Paiwan is an Austronesian language spoken in Southern Taiwan, with around 53,000 speakers. The majority of field reports on Formosan (Austronesian) languages give rather minimal details on their phonetic, phonological, and prosodic properties, usually one or two lines of vague description. The paper addresses questions related to the evolution of language within the Paiwan speech communities and the development of language within the individual speaker. In the present paper, the interaction between phonetic variation and phonological distinctive features were dealt with, and the principles and the methodology in Laboratory Phonology and Acoustic Phonetics were used to verify the existing field notes in descriptive linguistics or adjust the phonological theories. Eight dialects of Paiwan, including Northern, Central, Southern, and Eastern varieties of Paiwan, were studied. The speech styles such as word lists, phrases, sentences, stories, and spontaneous speech were collected in the field and served as the voice corpus in the phonetic laboratory for measurements and further empirical studies. The goal of paper is also to harness the professional software of acoustic analysis and speech technologies to aid in the collection of field data. While constructing the voice corpus, it is hoped that a portable phonetic laboratory is accessible to the recording and analyzing tasks in the Paiwan voice data. The present project draws evidence from the field data and proposes an account for the interaction between phonetic variance and phonological invariance among the Paiwan dialects. The most significant contribution of the paper is the construction of the voice corpus and the interface study of the segments and suprasegmentals in the Paiwan dialects, which has never been done in any earlier field report or project. The preservation of the phonetic voice data of the Paiwan dialects will help researchers understand more about the dialects and the language.
Alyson Eggleston, Mayangna Yulbarangyang Balna, Elena Benedicto: Participatory Action Research and the Experimental Process This paper addresses the role of a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach in the community's reappropriation of an externally-generated linguistic research project. By employing a PAR approach, we show that the indigenous researcher and community can still appropriate the work even if the research initiative has emerged from outside. The Mayangna of Nicaragua had established a linguistic research team in the mid 1990's. They were recently presented with a research initiative to document meronymies and spatial frames of reference as part of a larger project. Though part of this data had already been collected, this new project presented the opportunity to enlarge the database and view it from another perspective. The native researchers accepted that externally initiated proposal. Subsequently, a collaborative team was formed with indigenous and external researchers. The first step of the negotiation of the project involved a reevaluation of the experimental materials to adapt them to more culturally appropriate versions. Practical training on the technical aspects of the project ensued, including four parts: 1) experimental training in administering the tasks, 2) technical practice in video recording 3) the manipulation and uploading of digital media to ELAN, an annotation software tool, and 4) the actual collection and transcription of the data. During the first part of the training, the indigenous researchers performed the successive roles of participant, experimenter, and documenter. In this process, the indigenous researchers were able to evaluate the cultural appropriateness of the task design, and acquired new technological skills Ð building upon what they had acquired in a previous, internally-initiated research project. Through a continued rotation of roles, all native researchers trained collaboratively with each other and with the external researchers to conduct the experimental tasks, record results, and begin to interpret those results. This training culminated with the indigenous researchers all acting as main researchers in applying the corresponding experimental tasks with speakers of their own communities. As a result of applying a PAR approach to this project, we can observe that when native researchers take increasingly more responsibility for a project, even one that emerges external to the research group, they obtain greater directive power over the research process and the results obtained. The indigenous researcher is, thus, in a position to evaluate and adapt the research project, ultimately becoming the experts on the research design, implementation, and interpretation of the data, and consequently reappropriating the process for their own community use and benefit.
Candace Galla: Language Revitalization: Technological Developments Among Indigenous Language Communities An approach that is not new, but which has been under-utilized and has yet to be proven to be useful in Indigenous communities is the integration of technology to supplement efforts in Indigenous language education, revitalization and maintenance programs (Grenoble & Whaley, 2006). In the 1970s, the first Apple PC appeared, followed by the IBM PC in the following decade. The 1990s, however, brought about an array of technologies that included videodiscs, CD-ROMs, digital video, virtual reality, 3-D systems, HyperCard, Hyperstudio, and the Internet. Since then, the Internet has expanded rapidly, allowing users to search for information on the world wide web, download readily available files (documents, videos, music), and communicate with others via asynchronous tools (e-mail, message boards, blogs) and synchronous tools such chat and webcam (Murdock, 2004). Many Indigenous communities have embraced technologies, such as audio, video, and multimedia as a means to revitalize their language (Penfield, Cash Cash, Author, Williams, & Shadow Walker, 2006). For example, the Native Hawaiian community has incorporated technology in the curriculum at Kula Kaiapuni (Hawaiian Language Immersion Program) (Warschauer, 1998; Warschauer & Donaghy, 1997). Computer technology can be viewed either as a benefit, aid or supplement to language learning or may be viewed as a distraction and unnecessary tool (Bennett, 2003). Warschauer (1998), Hartle-Schutte and Naeʻole-Wong (1998) have described critical areas in which technology plays a role, specifically in the Hawaiian language community. However, the following described can be applied to other Indigenous languages as well, which include: 1) the preservation of the Indigenous language; 2) material development and dissemination; 3) multiple modes of communication; and 4) achieving relevance, significance and purpose.
References
Bennett, R. (1997). It really works! Native American cultural communication proficiency and a Hupa story. In J. Reyhner (Ed.), Teaching Indigenous Languages (pp. 160-205). Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University.
Grenoble, L. A. & Whaley, L. J. (2006).Saving languages: An introduction to language revitalization. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hartle-Schutte, D. & Naeʻole-Wong, K. (1998). Technology and the revival of the Hawaiian language.Reading Online.Retrieved August 18, 2007 http://www.readingonline.org.
Murdock, E. (2004). History of computers in education. Retrieved on March 11, 2008 from http://www.csulb.edu/~murdock/
Penfield, S., Cash Cash, P., Author, Williams, T., & ShadowWalker, D. (2006).Technology-enhanced language revitalization (2nd ed.). Tucson, AZ: Arizona Board of Regents, University of Arizona.
Warschauer, M. (1998). Technology and Indigenous language revitalization: analyzing the experience of Hawaiʻi. Canadian Modern Language Review, 55(1), 140-61.
Warschauer, M. & Donaghy, K. (1997). Leokī: A powerful voice of Hawaiian language revitalization. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 10(4), 349-362.
A. Sho Ikeda, Christopher Doty: New Roles for Technology in Language Maintenance and Revitalization According to Wikipedia, a centerpiece of Web 2.0 technologies, "Web 2.0 is a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web." These technologies are rapidly changing the way that people communicate and interact in their daily lives. If minority languages throughout the world are to continue to be a vital means of communication, rather than being replaced by a majority language, the adoption of new tools to allow interactive, electronic communication in these languages must be developed to meet current and future trends in electronic collaboration and communication. Prior to the development of Web 2.0, the Web was an expanding landscape of information that allowed the transfer of ideas from content producers to users. Users could view content, but were not able to easily produce their own or collaborate with like-minded individuals. This meant that the vast majority of content was produced by speakers of majority languages, especially English. However, with the growth of social networking, photo and video-sharing websites, wikis and other Web 2.0 applications, users are more able to easily communicate and interact with each other on a scale that has been heretofore unseen in our collective history. These new opportunities for interaction and idea sharing can provide truly unique forms of language-learning and communication in any language, but many challenges remain for minority language communities to make full use of these tools. This talk will focus on three main issues related to the development of Web 2.0 technologies for language revitalization and maintenance. First, it will examine the ways in which Web 2.0 is having an effect on daily communication and interaction worldwide in all communities, highlighting how these trends are likely to affect minority language communities in the coming years. Second, it will discuss some of the roadblocks to adapting technologies which were originally developed for English and other minority language, to new language situations, as well as some possible ways to address these problems. Third, it will provide concrete ideas for incorporating these technologies into a larger language maintenance/revitalization strategy in a way that allows even those without extensive technological resources or know-how to make use of them.
Rehman Khawaja: Language Shift in Kundal Shahi Kundal Shahi is a village in the Neelam valley 74 kilometers by road from Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Settlements belonging to Kundal Shahi are found on both sides of Jagran Nallah (a tributary of the Neelam river), a few minutes' walk from the Neelam valley highway. The dominant language of the Neelam valley, including the areas surrounding Kundal Shahi, is Hindko. But a section of the population of Kundal Shahi speaks a distinctly different language that is probably related to Shina, a major language of the Northern Areas of Pakistan My current research reveals a rapid process of language shift going on in Kundal Shahi. Many speakers have discontinued the use of the inherited language themselves and have not transmitted is to younger generations. This process probably started some 40 years ago. Before that, there is evidence that a situation of stable bilingualism existed for centuries where members of the Qureshi community spoke their own language among themselves and Hindko with outsiders The research carried out this summer reveals that the number of active speakers of the language is decreasing very rapidly and only around 22% of the population can use the language actively. Of this population of active speakers 80% belong to the elderly generation i.e. above the age of 50 in the total population of around 3300. This paper endeavors to determine and describe the factors leading to the recent rapid language shift among the community. I will also share the techniques and methodology used in field research for collecting data to compile a trilingual dictionary (Kundal Shahi, Urdu and English) of the language.
Yuwen Lai, John Lyon, Christopher Huff: Creation of computer-assisted language training materials for small languages This project proposes the incorporation of stimulus presentation systems in the construction of distant learning material for small languages. A variety of stimulus presentation systems have been widely adopted in experimental linguistics, most of which are capable of presenting audio and visual (image, video, and rich text) tokens, as well as collecting responses from users. Adopting these systems has the following advantages. An immediate benefit of these systems is that they make the learning process more interesting, through allowing the incorporation of cross-modal learning material (e.g. presenting an audio recording with a picture), which can more effectively engage learners while providing training in reading, speaking, and listening. Additionally, positive and negative feedback can be provided after each trial, allowing learners to be informed of mistakes in real-time. These systems also serve a dual role in the learning process, in providing both training and testing functions. The presentation of tokens can be randomized, so that a compiled corpus can be used repeatedly until learners are familiar with the tokens presented. The same material can also be used to test learners, simply by not including real-time feedback. User responses can be collected easily, and sent back to a research institute for remote evaluation. These functions are of course not groundbreaking in the field of software-based language training. They are fairly standard in training software for mainstream languages - which is precisely the point. The real benefit of these systems is that by being easy to create, distribute, and use, they allow small languages to take advantage of computer-assisted language learning. This is particularly relevant for small languages, where potential learners may be few in number and relatively spread out, and which otherwise might not have access to teachers. A researcher can create a training program in a matter of hours, without prior experience in programming, and distribute it via discs or the web. Many of these programs do not require any installation, and users need simply click, and the training program will run automatically. Input methods can range from simple mouse clicks and keyboard input, to microphone recordings. Our presentation will utilize Paradigm, a free stimulus presentation system, as a tool to demonstrate the construction of teaching material for Lillooet. We will present programs created for vocabulary training, as well as sentence and long paragraph comprehension.
Linda Lanz: Freezing Your Phonemes Off: Fieldwork Tips for Cold Environments This poster presents practical tips for linguists engaging in fieldwork in cold environments such as northern Alaskan. While there are an increasing number of books and articles aimed at preparing novice fieldworkers for successful trips (cf. Newman & Ratliff (2001), Bowern (2008)), most of this information assumes fieldwork will be conducted in warm climates and therefore offers no insights into the unique challenges faced in colder regions. Many endangered languages, however, are spoken in geographic areas with Arctic or subarctic climates, such as in Alaska, Russia, and the Nordic countries. With the rising interest in endangered language documentation and revitalization, more fieldwork is likely to be carried out in high latitudes, including above the Arctic Circle. While fieldworkers in (sub)arctic regions are unlikely to face malaria, for example, they can avoid equipment and data loss as well as safety risks by being informed about the effects of cold weather on linguistic work. I offer tips of general use for cold-weather fieldworkers - particularly those unaccustomed to cold weatherÑgleaned from my own fieldwork in northern Alaska. The tips presented fall largely into two categories: equipment and weather. Equipment- and safety-related advice for all seasons, especially winter, forms the majority of this section. Fieldworkers not familiar with cold weather may be unprepared for the effects of cold weather on linguistic instruments in the field, including recording devices, microphones, and cameras. Solar-powered equipment is not a viable option most of the year and batteries behave differently in extreme cold. Although not intended to replace medical advice, I also present health/safety concerns, such how to avoid snowblindness and dehydration. Many are not aware, for example, that though it may seem counterintuitive, dehydration is a serious risk in cold weather. Being forewarned, a fieldworker can recognize and prevent problems in the field. Miscellaneous tips, such as how to sleep in 24-hour summer sunlight, remain sane in the 24-hour darkness of winter, or safely traverse (sub)arctic terrain such as muskeg is also presented. Forewarned about the challenges, arctic fieldworkers can focus on the task at hand.

References:
Bowern, Claire (2008). Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Newman, Paul and Martha Ratliff, eds. (2001). Linguistic Fieldwork. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johann Larusson, Roser Saurí, & Xulio Viejo: Collaborative corpus building for minorized languages using wiki-technology. Documenting the Asturian language Eslema is the first project devoted to building a corpus for Asturian. Asturian (or Asturian-Leonese) is the Romance language autochthonous of most of the territory in Asturias, Leon and Zamora provinces (Spain), and the district of Miranda do Douro (Portugal). Its community of speakers is estimated to be around 300,000 people, corresponding to approximately a third of the population of the area where Asturian is spoken. These figures bode ill for the future of the language since Asturian competence is notably reduced among young people, a fact that seriously threatens its generational transmission (Llera Ramo, 2002). Being the corpus of a minorized language, Eslema’s main goals are both (a) documenting Asturian in a systematic way, and (b) helping set the foundation for codifying and fully normalizing it as the language of use in any possible social context. As such, the project is conceived as a general framework for developing several subcorpora, including documents of a varied typology and from different historical periods, representing both written and oral discourse (Author, 2008a). Eslema’s scarcity of funding has prompted an alternative search for much needed resources. As with many Western minorized languages Asturian speakers feel a degree of commitment to the language and its survival. Using this to our advantege, we have developed a wiki-based environment that enables the entire Asturian community to collaboratively collect and annotate texts online, enlarging Eslema at a minimum cost. Wikis are ideally suited for this kind of activity. A wiki is essentially a website enabling non-collocated users to easily asynchronously co-edit and share documents. Wikis are very loosely structured and do not favor a particular type of content or a “tech-savvy” method of manipulating the content. Previous research has developed a platform called the WikiDesignPlatform (WDP) to support different kinds of wiki-based collaborative learning activities (Author, 2008b). The WDP provides a suite of awareness, navigational, and communicative components that can be easily layered on top of, or coupled with, standard wiki features. Using the WDP platform, we are able to quickly engineer an online workspace tailored to the needs of community. Users can easily suggest documents for classification, collectively classify texts, and communicate their work. Using the WDP’s awareness features, users can keep current on the progress of their work and the advancement of individual documents. This paper, presents the collaborative WDP-based environment we have built, its application and results in compiling the Asturian corpus. References: Author (2008a) Eslema. Towards a Corpus for Asturian. In Collaboration: interoperability between people in the creation of language resources for less-resourced languages. A SALTMIL workshop. LREC 2008. Marrakesh. Author (2008b). Supporting and Tracking Collective Cognition in Wikis. In Proceedings of ICLS 2008: International Conference for the Learning Sciences: Vol. 3 (pp. 330-337). The International Society of the Learning Sciences. Llera Ramo, F. (2002). II Estudiu siciollingüísticu d’Asturies. Avance de datos. In Lletres Asturianes, 89, 181–197.
Amy Pei-jung Lee: Kavalan Cultural Heritage Project This paper presents a proposal called 'Kavalan Cultural Heritage Project' (henceforth KCHP) designed to cater for both academic and community-based readers. Kavalan is an endangered Formosan language with less than one hundred fluent speakers residing side by side with the Amis people. Yet being the last surviving plains-tribe of which the language is used in daily lives, and having the most population compared with the other plains tribes in Taiwan, Kavalan is able to provide a glance into the traditional culture of the plains tribe people. Although Kavalan is rather well-studied in terms of its linguistic (e.g. Li 1996, Lee 1997, Chang 1997, 2000, Li and Tsuchida 2006), historical (e.g. Tsan 1998), and anthropological studies (e.g. Shimizu 1994, Liu 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, to name a few), an effect has not been made to integrate those works and make them useful or comprehensive for the community. This proposal as an interdisciplinary work intends to provide a corpus for not only presenting the relevant research in an approachable way but also serving as an ongoing project for linguistic and cultural documentation. This paper will also discuss the structure and organization of this project, how each discipline is presented, and the roles and functions of the academic professionals and Kavalan consultants/language-helpers involved in the project.
Sarah Lee: Who speaks Penang Hokkien? Issues when selecting speakers of a shifting contact language Penang Hokkien (PH) is a contact variety of Hokkien spoken on the island of Pulau Pinang in Malaysia. It exists in a language contact situation not only with other Southern Min languages, e.g., Teochew, but other Chinese languages, e.g., Mandarin and Cantonese, and with genetically-unrelated languages, Malay and English. Documenting many of its linguistic features necessitates carefully thought out decisions on informant selection because one cannot assume that a feature used in the speech of one informant is common to all or even many PH speakers. This is because multiple factors have or are influencing language variation and change in the speech community, for example, code-switching,  identity, medium of education and language shift, and the fact that these factors themselves are subject to change. For example, the PH of older speakers is reflective of a period where there was much more interaction with local Malay populations and where there were larger numbers of other Chinese dialect speakers, hence PH developed with noticeable influence from these. However, amongst the younger generation (under 35) today, a huge language shift is occurring – increasingly, Mandarin is replacing PH as the vernacular language of choice, and this is motivating changes in the PH of this generation not seen in older generations, and indeed has led to some language loss.  
It goes without saying that tremendous variation is found amongst individuals and groups of speakers. For the field linguist entering this community, selection of informants is therefore crucial as this will determine “whose” of Penang Hokkien is documented or analyzed.   Here, some factors that complicate informant selection, are discussed, using my own experiences in documenting PH’s tone system, lexical items and grammatical features. For these objectives, it was necessary to conduct detailed surveys into each speaker’s dialect/clan backgrounds, language/s of education, use of and attitudes to other languages, and even the length of time since the settlement of their families in Penang as hardly any PH speakers today are ethnically pure Hokkiens. It was also helpful to sometimes frame variation found in terms of sociolinguistic ideas such as “communities of practice”.  
Elizabeth Mela-Athanasopoulou: Documenting the Kalasha Language: Some Challenges and Solutions The present paper based on extensive fieldwork conducted on Kalasha, an endangered language spoken in the three small valleys in Chitral District of Northwestern Pakistan, exposes a spontaneous dialogue-based elicitation of linguistic material used for the description and documentation of the language. After a brief display of the basic typology of elicitation techniques (Himmelmann 2006) and a thorough discussion of my fieldwork on a language threatened by extinction, I will show with my natural data recordings (audio-visual) how most essential documentation is for the revitalization of a language pressurized by outside forces. The main scope of the research is not only the Kalasha language documentation and maintenance, but also the motivation of the people, especially the young ones, to use it in their small communities. And this, I support, can be achieved through literacy: the production of a descriptive grammar and a series of graded textbooks. This talk is organized as follows: Part I shows the procedure of the elicitation, transcription and annotation of a huge corpus of authentic dialogues and narratives on themes ranging from everyday life situations, habits and customs in their villages to their cultural and social practices and tradition. For instance, apart from personal life situational dialogues or narratives, linguistic material was also drawn from my recordings of the Kalasha songs and stories told during their traditional/religious ceremonies (e.g. Zhosi and Cawmos festivals). The second part of my talk, (Part II) demonstrates extracts from the proposed text book consisting of only recorded material for primary school children. An attempt has been made to simplify the orthography of the Kalasha sounds and propose a new version of the alphabet in Roman script, (unlike the one initially proposed by Trail & Cooper 1999 and 2006, where the alphabet consists of literally 75 letters!). Overall, my main concern is to make it possible for the children and young learners to read and write in their own language the easiest possible way. Bibliography 1. Basher, Elena, 1988. Topics in Kalasha syntax. An areal and typological perspective. PhD dissertation. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 2. Cacopardo, A.M. & A.S. Cacopardo, 1996. The Kalasha in Southern Chitral. Part III: Jinjiret Kuh and the Problem of Kalasha Origins. In Bashir & Israr-ud-Din (1996) pp. 299-313 3. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P., 2006. Language documentation: what is it and what is it good for? pp 1-30. In Jost Gippert, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Ulrike Mosel, eds. Essentials of Language Documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 4. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P., 2006. The challenges of segmenting spoken language, pp 253-274. In Jost Gippert, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Ulrike Mosel, eds. Essentials of Language Documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 5. Seifart, Frank, 2006. Orthography development, pp 273-299. In Jost Gippert, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Ulrike Mosel, eds. Essentials of Language Documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 6. Trail, R. & G. Cooper, 1999. Kalasha Dictionary, with English and Urdu. National \institute of Pakistan Studies, and Summer Institute of Linguistics. Islamabad, Pakistan. 7. Trail, R. & G. Cooper, 2006. Kal'as'a alibe kitap. Islamabad, Pakistan.
Claire Ramsey: Including Hearing Signers in Sign Language Documentation: Lengua de Señas Mexicana (LSM) Documentation studies of sign languages must find ways to handle the variation in signing communities. National sign languages vary for typical reasons (e.g. region, generation, social class) and for a major atypical reason - most deaf children are born to hearing non-signing parents, so with few exceptions (the 6-10% born to Deaf families) virtually all signers are late learners. National signing communities include hearing signers, because most deaf signers have hearing children who acquire the sign language natively. However data from hearing signers are rarely used in research. Additionally, “village” sign languages, which arise in linguistically isolated communities if a gene for deafness occurs, present a case that also involves hearing signers since, in groups with a high proportion of deaf members, all people, both deaf and hearing, can be natives. Complete documentation of these sign languages would be lacking if data from hearing signers were not included. LSM, the national sign language of Mexico, presents uneven distribution among deaf people because many remain isolated, and current schooling policies discourage use of signing with deaf children. Deaf people make contact with LSM in adolescence or early adulthood. And, although it is difficult to access LSM instruction, often first LSM contact comes via hearing late-learners of LSM who have become teachers, advocates, priests or interpreters. The issue here is the role of hearing signers, especially non-natives, in the documentation of LSM. This question is important more generally in language documentation, especially in endangered languages with small surviving communities where outsider speakers may play a role in teaching or revitalization efforts. Hearing native signers of LSM with deaf parents present an unambiguous case for inclusion in documentation, although their participation in a spoken language community needs to be taken into account. But hearing late learners present an ambiguous case both linguistically and culturally. From a deaf perspective, hearing non-native signers constitute a controversial group, sometimes considered benevolent helpers and sometimes considered powerful enemies. Community members may reject hearing signers as sources of data. Still, hearing signers occupy a prominent role as transmitters of language that is greater than that of deaf signers. These observations affect decisions about who might appropriately provide input for documentation, and the detail at which these data must be annotated, issues that are important for the field in general as well as for sign language documentation.
Keren Rice, Nicholas Rolle, Ireh Iyioha, Annat Koren: A community grammar of a different sort: The Esan Grammar Project In the past decade, as attention to language documentation has increased, so too has discussion of the goals of linguistic documentation with respect to the community of speakers, and community-based research paradigms have come increasingly to the fore. What happens if it is not possible to carry out linguistic work in a location where a language is traditionally spoken? Is it possible to create a kind of community-based project in such a situation? In 2006 in a linguistics field methods class, the speaker turned to the class and remarked that there was no grammar of Esan (Niger-Congo, Nigeria), the language under study, and very little in the way of written materials was available on the language. She challenged the class, a mixed group of advanced undergraduates and graduate students, to take on the writing of a grammar. A group of students decided to take up this challenge, and this was the beginning of the Esan Grammar Project. Most of one term was spent coming to an understanding of what a grammar is, and what the responsibilities to the Esan community, living an ocean away, were. Students formed groups, depending on their interests, and took on the responsibility for different aspects of the grammar. The speaker sought out other speakers of the language in the local community so that the grammar would represent more than the speech of a single individual, and it would be possible to look at language in use to some degree. A community arose through the students and speakers working together to build a grammar of the language, with each contributing to the knowledge of the others. This local community formed the backbone of the project in the absence of the Esan community in Nigeria, facilitating the documentation of the language as well as enhancing the pride that the speakers involved in the project take in the language. The goal of the project is to create a product which can be used both within the field of linguistics, and by the larger Esan community we have become intimate with. In this presentation, we outline some successful strategies we as a group have employed to overcome setbacks and challenges, and discuss the next phases of our project: sending a student and one of the speakers to conduct fieldwork in Nigeria, and have a grammar ready for publication by the end of 2009.
Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby: A collaborative project for the documentation of the Shughni language Shughni, an Eastern Iranian language, is spoken by approximately 40,000 people in the Pamir Mountains of eastern Tajikistan and by another 20,000 in neighboring Afghanistan. Shughni has no written tradition and has been documented to only a limited extent. It is considered endangered because Tajik (a Western Iranian language) and Russian are the languages of education, government and the media in Tajikistan. In July 2008, a team of scholars gathered at a month-long workshop at the University of Kentucky to launch a long-term collaboration devoted to producing a comprehensive grammar of Shughni. Participants included three specialists from Khorog State University (all native speakers of Shughni), four linguists on the University of Kentucky faculty, and three students at Kentucky. This project has been planned to take the fullest advantage of the synergy between participants with diverse areas of specialization. First, our team of linguists includes native Shughni speakers who are active in the small but energetic community of language researchers in Tajikistan. Our project draws upon and contributes directly to the tradition of research on Shughni in Tajikistan. (We will accordingly produce two versions of this grammar--one in English, the other in Russian, the customary metalanguage in native grammatical studies.) In addition, we anticipate that the native speakers on our project team will attract the interest and cooperation of Tajik educational and governmental authorities in our work. Second, our team contains specialists in various areas of linguistics, including lexicology, morphosyntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. Our description of Shughni will draw attention to features of Shughni grammar of particular theoretical, typological, or historical interest. For this reason, this grammar will be of wide interest among linguists, and not merely among Iranianists. Third, some team members have extensive experience with digital recording technology and with computational resources for language documentation. Our published grammatical description will be complemented with online archival material and databases for further research; we also draw upon computational methodologies whose use in fieldwork is unprecedented, particularly morphological generation programs for data elicitation. In addition, our team incorporates non-linguists in areas of study relevant to assembling the grammar, including specialists in anthropology, folklore, geography, and computer science; Igor Sopronenko, a documentary filmmaker, will contribute to our efforts by producing a film about the sociolinguistic status of the Shughni language and the contexts of its use. We will discuss each of these distinctive characteristics of our collaborative project in our presentation.
Haralambos Symeonidis: Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico: Documenting endangered varieties of Guaraní For the last 15 years the ALGR linguistic project (Guarani-Romance Linguistic Atlas) has been intensively trying to give answers to a series of linguistic questions concerning the Guaranitic area: Paraguay, Northeast Argentina, and parts of Brazil on the borders of Paraguay. Before this project started, neither the researchers nor the politicians had considered how linguistic knowledge and behaviour were distributed in each of these corresponding areas; whether there were regional varieties of Guaraní and Spanish; whether linguistic behaviour depended on the social class of the speaker; and how it was distributed between males and females and among different generations. Until the present research project, there had never been reliable knowledge of the true territorial expansion of Guaraní and the linguistic interference between Guaraní and Spanish in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. According to Himmelmann “A […] major difference between description and documentation […] concerns the role of primary data within the two frameworks. Within the documentation framework, primary data are of central concern. The goal is to present as many primary data with as much analytical information as possible. […] Within the descriptive framework, […], primary data are a means to an end, that is, the analysis of a language system”. (Himmelmann 1998: 168) One of the most important differences in the methodology of ALGR is the fact that no primary data have been excluded simply because they did not fit a given analytical format or because they were not relevant to a particular research goal. This presentation will discuss the importance of the ALGR linguistic project whose objective has not only been to describe but also to document, for the first time Guaraní varieties – like the one of Corrientes, Argentina. A series of questions will be answered, like: Has the ALGR contributed to the documentation of an endangered language? Is Paraguayan Guaraní considered an endangered language? What’s the difference between the ALGR and the other linguistic atlases? Bibliography Himmelmann, Nikolaus. “Documentary and descriptive linguistics”. Linguistics. 36. (1998). 161-195. Thun, Harald; Dietrich, Wolf. Átlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico (ALGR-S), Tomo I Comentarios. Tomo II Mapas. Kiel, Westensee-Verlag, 2002. [= Dialectologia pluridimensionalis roma¬nica 2]. Thun, Harald/ Bogado, Mario. Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico. Poranduty avañe’ē ha karaiñe’ēme, Mbohapyha jejapopyre momorãnby. Cuestionario Guaraní-Castellano tercera edici'n mejorada. Kiel: Westensee-Verlag, 62002 Thun, Harald/ Aquino, Almidio. “El Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico, un trabajo necesario para actualizar informaciones lingüísticas sobre el español y el guaraní del Paraguay”. Ñemitỹ 36. (1998). 8-14.