Contents

I. Language Endangerment CrisisKrauss, Michael. 1992. The world's languages in crisis. Language 68(1):410 Defines three levels of language health/endangerment (moribund, endangered, safe) based on whether children are learning the language and will, during the coming century, continue to do so. Estimates that 90% of the worlds languages will become extinct in the 21st century and calls on linguists and linguistics as a discipline to document languages and store the documentation in safe repositories so as to enable possible revitalization, as well as to work actively with local communities and governments for supportive language planning. Laments the lack of interest in and support for study and documentation of endangered languages in academia. Colette Craig, Nora England, Laverne Masayesva Jeanne, Michael Krauss, Lucille Watahomigie, and Akira Yamamoto. 1992. Endangered Languages. Language 68.1-42. In 1991, the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America included a symposium entitled "Endangered Languages and Their Preservation" organized by Kenneth Hale and Michael Krauss. The talks given at that meeting were published in the journal Language (Hale et al. 1992), and they served a critical role in heightening linguists' awareness of the urgency of language endangerment, as well as raising issues on the responsibilities of linguists. These subsequent growing body of work on language documentation and revitalization reflects a shift in how linguistic fieldwork is taught and practiced, in the types of material considered to be research product, and in the re-evaluation of how 'broader impacts' is interpreted at grant agencies. Language documentation and revitalization have been argued to have scientific merit and humanistic value. Ladefoged, Peter. 1992. Another view of endangered languages. Language 68: 809-811. This short article is cast as an answer or rebuttal to the views expressed in Hale et al. Endangered Languages published in this same volume of Languagee earlier in the year. Ladefoged begins by noting, The views expressed in these papers are contrary to those held by many responsible linguists (809). In particular, he 1

takes exception to the idea that minority language communities invariably regard their languages as sacred. He notes several communities with whom he has worked who do not seem to regard their language as more than the intellectual and economic tool that it is in their daily lives. He notes that many such communities are only too happy to open their language up for foreign linguists to study and record. He also notes that several such groups voluntarily choose to forsake their language, especially so that their children may be raised with an LWC as their first tongue so as to guarantee greater opportunity. Ladefoged argues that linguists have no right to interfere with or argue against such calculations on the part of minority language speakers. He goes on to take exception to the notion that languages always ought to be preserved. It is paternalistic of linguists to assume that they know what is best for the community. One can be a responsible linguist and yet regard the loss of a particular language, or even a whole group of languages, as far from a catastrophic desctruction (Hale et al. 1992:7). Statements such as just as the extinction of any animal species diminishes our world, so does the extinction of any language (Hale et al. 1992:8) are appeals to our emotions, not to our reason. The case for studying endangered languages is very strong on linguistic grounds. It is often enormously strong on humanitarian grounds as well. But it would be self-serving of linguists to pretend that this is always the case. We must be wary of arguments based on political considerations. I am no more in favor of genocide or repression of minorities than I am of people dying of tuberculosis or starving through ignorance. We should always be sensitive to the concerns of the people whose language we are studying. But we should not assume that we know what is best for them (810). Ladefoged goes on to argue that language groups are not like animal species and that the world is adept at preserving diversity. Different cultures die as new ones arise. The new ones are not the same as what was lost, but they are nonetheless valuable and worthy. He maintains that linguists should comport themselves with professional detachment in situations where nations struggle to balance the need for unity and economic and educational feasibility with vernacular preservation, not arguing for any one course of action over another. Dorian, Nancy C. 1993. A response to Ladefogeds other view of endangered languages. Language 69: 575-579. Dorian takes aim at specific points made by Ladefoged in his own, general response to the Hal et al. suite of articles in Language 1992. She first argues that Ladefoged implies by his warning against arguments based on political considerations that apolitical positions can be found and adopted (575). Dorian holds that such is not possible where endangered languages are concerned. In actuality, linguistic salvage work which consists solely of record[ing] for posterity certain structural features of a threatened small language is inevitably a political act, just as any other act touching that language would be (575). Whether the linguist sides with a government trying to impose unity and fearing that vernacular languages will lead 2

to tribalism and fragmentation or with a minoritized community fighting the oppression of a stronger central government, he is engaged in a political issue. While Dorian does not advocate fomenting rebellion, she argues in general that nation-states often exercise power to the detriment of minority language groups. At any rate, a field linguist cannot avoid political entanglement. In response to Ladefogeds use of speakers of Toda in India and Dahalo in Africa willingly forsaking their native tongues in favor of LWCs that promise more opportunity for their children, Dorian holds up the example of grandchildren of Scotts Gaelic speakers in East Sutherland who berate their forebears for not transmitting the ancestral language, despite overwhelming social stigma attached to its use. Since such third generation pursuit of ancestral languages is common, Dorian argues that we must remain sensitive to a longer-term dynamic than simply a single groups choice to seek socio-economic betterment in the here and now. In response to Ladefogeds assertion that language loss may not be catastrophic, Dorian points out that it is undisputed that large numbers of languages are dying, that their structures and phonologies have lots to offer developing theories, that they are recoverable if documented properly and revitalized, but probably never in the exact same form as their prior, robust existence. Finally, Dorian takes issue with Ladefogeds emphasis on the possibility of objectivity and simply laying out the facts of linguistic situations. She notes that such facts are often not readily discernible and involve considerable political and social implications. She states that Ladefoged either sidesteps or completely ignores considerable ethical issues in his discussion and that, if there is one point on which linguists can and should agree, it is that linguists advocacy is worth bringing to bear on the large-scale language endangerment situation that exists in the world today. Comrie, Bernard and Martin Haspelmath. 2001. The library of Babel. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Recites the common statistics of 6,500 languages in the world, of which between 90% and 50% will become extinct during the 21 st century. Invokes metaphor of Borges Library of Babel to cast languages in the mold of repositories of human knowledge like volumes on library shelves. Includes intriguing examples of linguistic diversity, like Jamul Tiipay of S. CA where kinship terms are verbs instead of nouns, and Kayardild of N. Australia where tense marking is found on nouns as well as verbs. Cites case of Malagasy as example of how knowledge of minor languages helps to reconstruct prehistory. Details efforts of the Max Planck Institute to create a World Atlas of Language Structures and create an online archive for language documentation at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Whalen, D. H. and Gary F. Simons. Forthcoming. Endangered language families. 1st International Conference on Language Documentation 3

and Conservation, University of Hawaii, 12-14 March 2009. Power Point Presentation. Notes addition by the UNESCO Atlas of the Worlds Languages in Danger of category of unsafe to definition of language endangerment, defined as most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains. Echoes Krauss estimate that only 10% of the worlds languages are safe. The emerging consensus is that 50% of the worlds languages will be lost in the 21 st century. Uses the sizes of languages in family (i.e. number of speakers) as estimator of endangerment. Ethnologue contains 116 language families, of which 56 are judged endangered and 38, potentially endangered. Also uses Sapirs notion of linguistic stock to provide more accurate basis for considering linguistic diversity: 342 stocks in Ethnologue, of which 194 are endangered, 106 potentially endangered. The Americas, the Pacific, and Asia dominate in both linguistic diversity and endangerment.

Whalen, D. H. and Gary F. Simons. Forthcoming. Endangered language families. Ms Takes on unexplored question of the endangerment/extinction of entire language families, using notion of linguistic stock (the largest subgroups of related languages that are reconstructable (2)) to examine the worlds linguistic diversity. Data set includes 372 [note conflict with figure of 342 from presentation] linguistic stocks with at least one living language as of 1950; of these 15% (50 stocks) are found to have become extinct with another 27% (102 stocks) moribund. A loss of 50% of spoken languages this century would entail the extinction of an additional 25% of linguistic stocks; 90% language death would leave only 11% of the stocks with one safe language. Provides list of vitality of linguistic stocks by world area from worst to best: Americas, Pacific, Asia, Africa, Europe. The languages lost carry great social significance for the peoples involved, and the resulting gaps in our knowledge of human language limit our attempts to understand language in its ultimate range of expression (4). Ethnologue lists a total of 7,413 languages in existence as of 1950, when it first began tracking languages. Two key sources exist for estimating large numbers of endangered languages: Ethnologue (Lewis 2009) and UNESCOs Atlas of the Worlds Languages in Danger (Mosely 2010). Divides endangered languages into three categories: extinct, moribund, and viable, defining the middle term after Krauss (1992). Size of population correlates well with language endangerment. 25% of all languages spoken today have been classified as moribund. Seven languages with more than one million speakers are classified by UNESCO as definitely endangered, i.e. moribund: Emilian-Romagnol, Kangdi, Ligurian, Lombard, Piedmontese, Romani, Yiddish (Israel). The median size of the 4

languages in the world today is 7,500 speakers (12). The 90 th percentile for language size is 340,000 speakers. 40% of linguistic diversity as reflected in stocks present in 1950 has already suffered death and doom. The loss of languages reduces the range of phenomena that linguists can address and makes claims for universal features of language more and more tenuous (14). While the loss of any language without good documentation leaves a significant gap in the knowledge base of humankind, the loss of a whole linguistic stock without documentation leaves an even bigger gap (15). The decision of whether to cling to or abandon a minority language rests with the community itself, not linguists. The loss of language families entails the loss of important information that can clarify the history and prehistory of a region. Provides examples of types of important data provided by endangered languages. The re-evolution of todays range of language familiesnot just individual languageswould take tens of thousands of years (17).

Hammarstrm, Harald. The Status of the Least Documented Language Families in the World, Language Documentation and Conservation Vol. 4 (2010), 177-212. Rating: 4 Summary: This paper presents a catalogue of all known language families that are not yet extinct, but all of whose member languages are essentially undocumented. Evaluation: The paper builds somewhat upon Simons and Whalen (2009), but utilizes a larger data base than they did. Hammarstrm bases his figures on what specialist literature exists as well as on the population and endangerment figures from Ethnologue 16 (Lewis 2009). The author presents no argument or original concepts; his aim is merely to list the least documented language families so as to aid linguists in setting priorities for language documentation work. The survey provided is interesting and tantalizing in just how little we know about these languages. Details: The author presents a table and detailed breakdown of 27 language families, all but four of which are one-member families: isolates. The overwhelming majority of the families listed are to be found in Papua New Guinea. Four hail from South America, two from India, and one from Africa. In order to be included, the language families had to meet four criteria: 1) The family must be known through at least a wordlist, however modest in size; 2) The family must not be demonstrably related to any other known family as far as our present state of knowledge permits us to know; 3) The family must not be extinct; 4) All languages in the family must be poorly documented, meaning there has been no grammar sketch and no ongoing documentation effort. The author maintains a website 5

(http://haraldhammarstom.ruhosting.nl/least_documented/ ) for changes and updates to his listing. As of 2/2/12 at 7:13am, this URL is listed as not found. Quotes: There are several legitimate reasons for pursuing language documentation (cf. Krauss 2007 for a fuller discussion). Perhaps the most important reason is for the benefit of the speaker community itself (see Voort 2007 for some clear examples). Another reason is that it contributes to linguistic theory: if we understand the limits and distribution of diversity of the worlds languages, we can formulate and provide evidence for statements about the nature of language (Brenzinger 2007; Hyman 2003; Evans 2009; Harrison 2007). From the latter perspective, it is especially interesting to document languages that are the most divergent from the ones that are well-documented in other words, those that belong to unrelated families (117).

Crystal, David. 2003. Endangered languages: what should we do now? In Peter K. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description 1:18-34. London: SOAS.

Calls for focus on new horizons now that the basic theoretical questions of language endangerment have been answered to general satisfaction. Need to develop an applied preventive linguistics and typology of intervention (1), as well as bridge the gap between academic and general, public awareness of problem. Three criteria must be met before progress with an endangered language can be made: 1) bottom-up interest (1) from the affected communities themselves; 2) top-down interest (2) from all levels of government; 3) cash. Cites the Babel Myth (2) as a factor in lack of public commitment to recognizing the problem: the belief that a single language on earth guarantees a mutually intelligible and therefore peaceful planet. While magazines and radio have begun coverage of language endangerment in earnest, TV has lagged far behind in coverage of most linguistic issues. What approaches there have been on TV concentrate only on local populations and not the larger language endangerment picture or what it means to all of us. There is little to no interest in language death among the general population; this interest must be both intellectual and emotional. The Great Divide isthe gap between consciousness and conscience (4). Since art communicates most directly to the widest possible audience, we must harness its power in order to spread the word. Up to now, precious little coverage of the phenomenon has been undertaken in the various arts, save, perhaps, for poetry. Such coverage needs to happen in order to get the subject into the three domains where it will have the greatest impact: media, school, and home. Communication with the public is the most neglected side of the linguists profession. To this end, we must: 1) compile an archive or library of metadata about 6

endangered languages; 2) inaugurate a UNESCO prize for outstanding achievement in endangered languages.

Engstrand, Olle. Why are clicks so exclusive? Papers from Fonetik 97, The Ninth Swedish Phonetics Conference, held in Ume, May 28-30, 1997. Reports from the Department of Phonetics, Ume University (PHONUM), 4, 191-194. Rating: 3 Summary: The author develops the thesis that clicks are limited to Africa because their likely development is preconditioned by certain phonetic features that, while rare, are amply represented in African languages. Evaluation: I came to this little paper as a rabbit trail from the previous piece by Whalen that mentioned how, when a language invests in an unusual and difficult sound, it generally overuses it. This is a succinct exploration of an interesting phenomenon that, if nothing else, prompts thought into why certain areal phenomena should be so confined to their respective regions. Details: Clicks have variously been explained away as being particularly difficult from the articulatory perspective or the remnant of some primitive precursor to human speech. Yet these explanations prove unsatisfactory when considered in detail. Labiovelar stops resemble clicks in having a double articulation with a posterior component involving the soft palate and by exhibiting negative oral pressure with an audible click-like sound associated with the labial release. If labiovelars, then, form part of the preconditions for clicks, then why are they too largely restricted to African languages? Perhaps, the author advances, because they come about due to extreme velarization used to enhance auditory effects associated with the implosives (192). [Cf. Mike Cahills talk during phonetics: there are some languages with labiovelars in both S. America and Asia, all near the equatorial belt] The implosives, in turn, auditorily resemble prenasalized stops, which are also common in African languages. Quotes: One of the most striking examples of areal skewness in the worlds sound inventories is the limitation of clicks to the languages of southern Africa. [C]licks are fundamental to the phonologies of many languages of the region. It is rather unusual that clicks should be absent from the overwhelming majority of the worlds languages, but at the same time so dominant in the remaining ones (191). When a sound change has taken place, new sounds appear which provide new preconditions for further development. For example, by developing a voiced vs. voiceless stop contrast where it did not exist before, a language has set up a

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new basis for tonogenesis, i.e. the likelihood that a tone contrast will actually emerge in the language is increased (192). It should be noted that the African languages as a group stand out with respect to rate of occurrence of voiced stops in their inventories (Engstrand 1997). In view of this areal preference, it is reasonable to assume that the frequent occurrence of implosives and prenasalized stops in the African languages reflects historical processes whereby stop voicing may have become auditorily enhanced (193).

Ostler, Nicholas. 2003. Desperate straits for languages: how to survive. In Peter K. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description 1:168-178. London: SOAS. Since minority language communities are already so small, they tend to be uniquely sensitive to population decline. The majority of the worlds languages have the fewest speakers; the minority, the most. Each language is unique, individual, and irreplaceable; language loss is therefore personal. Yet languages can come back from the brink: Portuguese and English provide two such case studies. In both cases, the fortunes of the languages tracked closely with the political fate of the nation where they originated as mother-tongues. Language loss is often topdown like this, losing its apex first to a foreign tongue which then percolates down (6) to lower echelons of society. Political or social autonomy is highly beneficial for the survival of a language (7). Five factors favor the survival of minority languages: 1) resolute isolation (7); 2) political status (i.e. when a small language has official status for a political entity; e.g. Icelandic); 3) physical survival (i.e. children learn it, the community preserves a common life and territory of their own); 4) literary corpus and literacy; 5) self-conscious tradition (i.e. selfconsciousness as a distinct people with history and identity of their own; selfesteem) (8). Of these five factors, the first both lies outside of the ability of people to control and is, in itself, not an evident blessing to any human community (9). Therefore, to protect a language, we must: 1) give it status; 2) protect transmission and resist intrusion; 3) record, document, and publish; 4) build solidarity at all levels. An appendix outlines the activities of the FEL (Foundation for Endangered Languages). Epps, Patience. Language Endangerment in Amazonia: the Role of Missionaries, Bedrohte Viefalt: Aspects of Langage Death. Jan Wolgemuth and Tyko Dirksmeyer, eds. Berliner Beitrge zur Linguistik. Berlin: Weissensee, 2005. 311-327. Rating: 5

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Summary: This article examines language endangerment in the Rio Negro region of the northwest Brazilian amazon and determines that missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, have played a major role in exacerbating the problem. The author criticizes Protestant missionaries in particular for inexpert linguistic work and disingenuous as to their principal aim. Despite the overall critical tone, Epps does cite one example of a case where the efforts of Protestant missionaries help preserve a people and their language from extinction. Evaluation: The piece shows obvious bias against the missionary endeavor and relies too heavily on a few key sources for her complaints. That said, the perspective is important, especially for those training to work with PBT and SIL, if for no other reason than to demonstrate something of the nature of the opposition. Details: The Rio Negro region is home to languages of the Arawak, Tukanoan, and Vaups-Japura (Maku) families, and its inhabitants traditionally practice linguistic exogamy. Today, many people are abandoning their own languages in favor of Tukano and/or Portuguese. Causes of the linguistic devastation of the area include death from disease and massacre, loss of traditional lands and subsistence patterns/cultural norms, and the internalized perspective of the people themselves that they are inferior both socially and economically to the dominant society. Negative interactions between Europeans and native communities in the area stretch back to the 18th century and slavery, colonialism, and the rubber boom of 1870-1920. Catholic missionaries had the greatest impact on the ways of live of those indigenous peoples who survived these depredations. These early missions consciously tried to disrupt the traditional ways of life, breaking up longhouses and even violating ritual taboos and causing social upheaval. They also intimated those knowledgeable of traditional religious practices with vivid threats of hell and damnation if they did not renounce their association with such matters. As a result, much such knowledge was lost. The Catholic missionaries introduced new ceremonies and rituals that had no meaning for the native population. This was particularly true in the area of marriage. The missionaries also impacted linguistic practice by championing single languages as linguae francae, first Lingua Geral, imported from the east coast, then Tukano. They also essentially forced native populations to attend mission boarding schools where Portuguese was the language of instruction and interaction and native tongues were forbidden and severely punished. This situation produced alienation of children from both their cultures and their families. The semi-nomadic, forest-dwelling Hupdh escaped contact with Europeans and missionaries for many years, but, in 1970s, faced with the possibility of incursions by SIL, Salesian Catholic missionaries stepped up their efforts, coercing the Hupdh to live in new, settled villages where they could be civilized and evangelized. Today, most Hupdh still live in these small villages, where their health has declined, the variety of their diet has fallen away, and infant mortality has soared. Skin conditions are rampant due to the perceived need to wear clothes in the humid environment and the lack of soap to wash them and fighting has 9

become endemic as the traditional way of settling quarrels, by splitting groups and going separate ways, is no longer practicable. Traditional culture is declining and no longer being passed on the children. A number of fears and negative attitudes about traditional mores keep the Hupdh from abandoning the villages and returning to their semi-nomadic way of life in the forest. The most powerful Protestant missionary organizations active in the region in the past few decades have been New Tribes Mission and SIL. Both have massive infrastructures and large sources of funding, all devoted to the primary aim of evangelizing indigenous peoples. Both organizations have used linguistics as a front for their missionary activities. The quality of their linguistic work varies. The tactics of NTM in particular during the 1970s and 1980s, including coercion and physical force, have been highly suspect. Missionaries have also used fear as a psychological persuasion, showing pictures of hell that they knew the natives did not distinguish from photographs. Even with gentler tactics, however, coercion is never absent from the missionaries practice due to their status as powerful outsiders with planes, boats, and material wealth. This fact, combined with the ingrained sense of insecurity cultivated in the natives as a result of their collective history with non-indigenous dominance, casts their ability to make informed choices as to their faith and life questionable. In order to gain access to the peoples of the Vaups region, which is an official Indigenous Reserve and closed to non-Catholic missionaries, members of organizations associated with NTM present themselves to the government as NGOs called PROPAS (Program for Self-Sustaining Fishing). The groups settle a missionary family in each of two Hup villages, where they evangelize and voice disapproval of traditional practices like manioc beer and dances. Some missionaries, though, are more respectful of traditional culture and they do help with the importation of more advanced medicine to help fight the kinds of disease contracted from contact with non-Indians. Also, the Protestant missionaries have been largely responsible for turning the tide of cultural decline among the Dw people who have been kept from extinction largely due to such efforts. Though much positive work is done through linguistics by organizations like SIL, often orthographies designed by people with inadequate training create confusion when improved orthographies are introduced, and literacy efforts focus on the reading of culturally unfamiliar texts rather than native narratives, which would prove more effective. The nature of the missionary endeavor itself undermines the promotion of language and native speakers sense of pride. Quotes: [M]issionaries have done much to promote the process of language endangerment in these areas, and relatively little to combat it (p. 3). Quoting Curt Nimuendaj, a German-Brazilian anthropologist (1883-1945): The principal reason for the missionaries aversion to collective habitations isthat they see in them with every reasonthe symbol, the veritable bulwark of the former

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organization and tradition of the pagan culture that is so contrary to their plans for conversion, for spiritual and social domination (p. 4). The missionaries efforts to break down native ways of life and traditional cultural practices clearly had an effect on the local languages, especially via the gradual eroding of the local peoples sense of confidence in themselves and in the ways of their parents and grandparents. Over time, many Indian people internalized the primitive-civilized dichotomy and strove to become more civilized, which essentially meant adopting a lifestyle more like that of non-Indiansincluding a knowledge of Portuguese (p. 6). Such a separation and alienation of the younger generation from the older is directly implicated in situations of language shift all over the world (p. 7). The Protestant missionaries have tended to be even more active than the Catholics in wiping out native beliefs and practices. While Catholics in general particularly those present in the region todaytolerate the drinking of manioc beer, dancing, and even a certain amount of syncretism between Catholicism and local beliefs, many Protestant missionaries frown on these activities and do their best to put an end to them (p. 9). The Summer Institute of Linguistics, now known by its acronym SIL, is somewhat more sensitive in its approach than is the NTMin particular, it presents its members to the public as linguistic investigators rather than missionaries (p. 10). According to Lewis (1988: 106), the linguistic front put forward by the SIL and the Wycliffe Bible Translators was perceived even by some of its own early members as duplicitous, leading the Wycliffe founder William Cameron Townsend to provide the following argument in its defense: There is a Biblical precedent for [such subterfuge]. Namely, just as Jesus came out of Nazereth disguised very effectively as a carpenter, Wycliffe missionaries go into the field as linguists Was it honest for the son of God to come down to earth and live among men without revealing who he was? (p. 10). [T]he quality of the academic linguistic contributions of SIL missionaries varies widely. While some missionaries do produce sound linguistic documentation, as well as useful orthographies and materials for native-language literacy programs, there are clearly many who do not (p. 10). Lewis (1988: 231) quotes a NTM missionary in Venezuela as saying, they say that alls fair in war, and for us this is war for souls (p. 10). Quoting a letter in 1943 from the director of Brazils Indian Protection Service (SPI), the first drawback we observe after the entry of missionaries into an Indian tribe is the breakdown of tribal fraternity. Indians who became Catholic or Protestant form hostile groups and lose interest in their tribe (p. 12). 11

Moreover, even in the case of a struggling people like the Dw, there is in principle no reason why help must be packaged together with a soul-saving agenda; medical care, schooling, etc. can be provided with no strings attached by local government or NGOs (p. 13). [T]he goal to convert is inherently ethnocentric (p. 14).

Schieffeln, Bambi B. Marking Time: The Dichotomizing Discourse of Multiple Temporalities, Current Anthropology 43, Supplement August-October 2002. S5-S17. Rating: 4 Summary: In the 1970s, Protestant missionizing began in earnest among the Bosavi of Papua New Guinea and Australian missionaries moved into the area and set up permanent residence. This contact led to the introduction into the language of the Kaluli (a sub-group of Bosavi) of notions of Western-style temporality and concomitant ideas of scheduling and organization that were translated into the vernacular and inculcated in the new, uniquely Christian genres of lessons and sermons. The Kaluli thus participated in effecting a fundamental shift in their language in how they talk about and express time that accompanied a wholesale abandonment of traditional reckonings and forms of generic expression, like songs, laments, and traditional narratives, that were associated with the pre-Christian community. Evaluation: Schiffelns discussion is far more data-centered than Epps. The result is less rancor and more even-handedness. While it is likely that the author has a negative perspective on missions and missionary activity, she concentrates on simply providing the facts of the linguistic changes and her analysis of their significance without overly demonizing the forces responsible. She also emphasizes the role played by the community itself. Details: The changes principally had to do with the introduction of a seven-day work week and the traditional twelve month, Gregorian calendar. New terms were generated using the numbers with instrumental case markers (two different instrumental markers, one for days, another for months). Western style, timespecific greetings like a calque for good afternoon were also introduced. At times, Tok Pisin time references were incorporated, especially since the new ways of speaking were associated with cultural advance and Tok Pisin conveyed a sense of sophistication and distance. Another area of change evidenced principally in sermons and lessons was a temporal orientation away from the past and onto the present and future. Traditional ways of recording the past through place names was abandoned. The author first became aware of these linguistic changes while preparing a trilingual Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin dictionary, a process begun in the 12

1970s and continued through the mid 1990s. While rechecking entries from 1984 in 1990, consultants kept determining that certain words or expressions were wrong. When the linguists shared the sources texts that were recorded from the fathers of the consultants, it emerged that what had in fact changed was the culture: words associated with witchcraft, traditional beliefs, and negative emotions like anger, felt no longer to apply to Christianized Kaluli, had been abandoned or changed. Quotes: Innovation co-occurred with the erasure of entire expressive genressong, lament, and traditional narrative that were the moralizing practices of a people (p. S15). The past, cultural or personal, is a special target for fundamentalist Christians. Even thoughts about past traditions, whether real or imagined by missionaries, were considered as impediments to conversion and belief, and local pastors consistently conveyed this message(p. S15). The mission rhetoric repositioned Bosavi people according to its own narrative time frame, one in which everyone would be looking forward to the same thing at the same timethe Second Coming. Everyone would be preparing in the same way; the Bosavi people would be on the same timetable as everyone else. What mattered was only whether they were saved; that would become their only meaningful identity(p.16).

Dobrin, Lise M. et al. 2009. SIL International and the Disciplinary Culture of Linguistics. Language 85: 618-658. A must read for anyone interested in exploring the impact of SIL and Christian missionaries in general on modern linguistics, especially as relates to study of minority and endangered languages and amassing data on little-studied languages. This suite of articles features both pro and con points of view, with a notably negative take on SIL and missionary activities by Patience Epps and Herb Ladley and a positive emic view by Kenneth Olson. The titles and contents of the individual articles are as follows: Dobrin, Lise M. Introduction. 618-619. Dobrin, Lise M. and Jeff Good. Practical language development: Whose mission? 619-629. Focuses on relationship of SIL with academia and tension within academia over the fact that SIL is such a force in minority language study, maintaining both the Ethnologue and a vast infrastructure on which academic linguists must rely. Notes that these functions are notably not being fulfilled by secular academic institutions. 13

Svelmoe, William L. We do not want to masquerade as linguists: A short history of SIL and the academy. 629-635. A good overview of the history and development of SIL and its mission, especially the roles of Townsend and Pike and the controversies in Latin America. Handman, Courtney. Language ideologies, en dangered-language linguistics, and Christianization. 635-639. Examines the impact of missionizing on language ideology and identity maintenance/shift. Interesting discussion on possible negative side to literacy development vis--vis speakers connection to an oral language tradition on pages 638-639. Epps, Patience and Herb Ladley. Sytax, souls, or speakers? On SIL and community language development. 640-646. Contains notable criticisms of SIL for not publishing enough on the languages studied, SIL emphasis on community self-determination especially as regards decision to open community to missionary activity, cultural change as a result of discouragement of traditional practices. Olson, Kenneth S. SIL International: An emic view. 646-652. Details especially the positive work accomplished by SIL and the numerous honors and accolades bestowed by communities and nations in which SIL has worked. Responds explicitly to many of the types of accusations made against the organization in articles such as Epps and Ladley.

II. Moral ImperativeSkutnabb-kangas, Tove, Luisa Maffi, and David Harmon. 2003. Sharing a World of Difference: The Earth's linguistic, cultural and biological diversity. UNESCO, Terralingua, and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) International. Begins with interesting Wolof poem on the subject of language loss. Flows into a discussion of biodiversity and its importance for evolution and world ecology. Linguistic and cultural diversity are similar to biodiversity in many ways: both are lost through human mismanagement or maltreatment and takeover by invasive species, both add to the store of total human knowledge of the world and can result in useful and practical advancements of science (cf. medicinal plants and knowledge of them encoded in languages, animal behavior patterns encoded in languages, 14

etc.), both occur in certain key hotspots that often overlap, and each is distributed unequally throughout the world, both are detrimentally affected by the same socioeconomic changes that destroy both ecosystems and traditional cultures. Linguistic diversity even interacts directly with biodiversity insofar as numerous endangered language communities maintain complex systems of traditional ecological knowledge including taxonomies, plant and animal names, and management strategies/practices. Advances the notion that linguistic assimilation is wholly involuntary inasmuch as minority language communities either only have one option (viz. to learn the dominant language and accept it for education and government) or do not have enough knowledge to understand the long-term consequences of their choices when available. Reports results of programs such as that in PNG to include more local, minority languages in formal education while also instructing in the dominant language (English) as a second language: students learned faster, became bilingual, became literate more easily, were more enthusiastic and confident about learning. Also a similar program in Finland with Saami pupils.

Nettle, Daniel and Suzanne Romaine. 2000. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapter. 3 "Lost Words/Lost Worlds" pp. 50 - 77. See especially the first paragraph on p. 51, the last paragraph on p. 77, and skim specific examples in the section on "Lost languages, lost knowledge" on pp. 69 ff.) [L]anguages, like species, are highly adapted to their environments and all extinctions have as their cause environmental change (50). Sudden language death: language dies intact as all speakers are exterminated, often by natural disaster, as with Tamboran language in Indonesia in 1815 volcanic eruption. Also by genocide (Ishi, Yahi tribe). Often it can be difficult to determine when the last speaker of a language has died due to trouble locating remaining speakers and hidden pockets of survival in exceptional cases. Also, rememberers may survive the active use of a language by several generations (52). Gradual language death occurs when knowledge of a language atrophies with time due to desuetude. Words and expressions are forgotten piecemeal, especially when the cultural practice that once underlay them also vanishes. In such cases, general words and expressions usually take precedence over specific ones, as with an Alzheimer patient. Thus, the final generation may not remember a language well enough to permit a linguist to reconstruct its former, healthier form. A languages specific vocabulary is an inventory of the items a culture considers important and which allow it to survive its 15

local ecosystem. Classifier systems, such as that of Dyirbal, tell us something about how the people conceive their world and interact with it. The more complex aspects of languages tend to vanish first because they take longest for children to acquire and the childrens acquisition of them is often interrupted or not adequately supported by the more dominant culture. The ways of thought and perception/conception encoded in languages render them verbal botanies (69) or even verbal astronomies, verbal herpetologies, etc. Human languages are the main agents of cultural transmission. [A] language is part of a complex ecology that must be supported if biodiversity is to be maintained (77).

Davis, Wade. 2003. Cultures at the far edge of the world. A talk given at TED 2003, February 2003, Monterey, California. Duration: 22:44. Ours is only one way of seeing and being in the world. Other cultures demonstrate that there are myriad other ways, each of them successful in their own way, each complete in its own way. The cultural web of life is the ethnosphere: the thoughts, dreams, artistic creations of all humankind throughout time. Just like the biosphere , the ethnosphere is eroding, and at a far greater rate. More than half of the languages, the old growth forests of the mind, are threatened. Approximately every two weeks, the last speaker of some language dies. Takes the listeners on a tour of the ethnosphere, noting and commenting on numerous minority cultures and languages like the Waorani, Voodoo devotees in Haiti, etc. Talks at length about ayahuasca and the specifics of its preparation and botanical knowledge necessary for it. Unlike genocide, ethnocide is not universally condemned, and is even applauded as a development strategy. Loss of diversity reduces the human imagination to a mundane modality of thought. The world deserves to exist in a diverse way.

Manatowa-Bailey, Jacob. 2007. On the brink. Cultural Survival Quarterly 31(2):12-16. Language death is due to psychological war (12): it requires getting into the head and mind of the affected people, usually through education programs in a dominant language. In order to counteract such effects, large-scale programs placed entirely in the hands and control of the local communities must be put in place to provide immersion experiences for learners. The size of the educational undertaking is not as important as the quality of the content and interaction. The needs for large training enterprises and funding are the two major obstacles to such approaches. Current funding provided by the US government is woefully inadequate to the task. Mother-tongues are key to identity and healthy personhood. 16

Kipp, Darrell. 2007. Swimming in words. Cultural Survival Quarterly 31(2):36-43. Describes authors background, education off the reservation, and eventual return to seek his roots and give back to the native community by educating youth in their own tribal history. Asserts that personal and cultural identity stems from language, and language revitalization rehabilitates both people and their culture.

UNESCO. 2008. Thematic debate: Protecting indigenous and endangered languages and the role of languages in promoting EFA in the context of sustainable development. UNESCO Executive Board, 180th session. Laments UNESCOs track record regarding languages and calls for action now on behalf of endangered languages. Languages should be equal in the eyes of policy makers. The vision of one uniform and unifying language is a fantasy. Language is, by its very nature, heteroglossic (2), breaking the world down into separate and distinct entities, groups, categories. Prematurely interrupting use of the mother-tongue results in interruption of cognitive and academic development. By encouraging use of mother-tongues in education, governments can foster the development of scientific and technical vocabulary necessary to the advancement of science and industry, thereby combatting the North-South divide. UNESCO has helped to encourage this technicalization (4) of mother-tongues. Thus mothertongues play an important role in education and social and economic development. Language contributes to shaping individual and collective identity. It is an intrinsic part of us. It is the vehicle for transmission of the cultural heritage from generation to generation (8). Languages are essential for the transmission of knowledge and information to all the components of society and we must acknowledge their strategic importance if we want to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Education for All (EFA) goals. Languages are integration factors, for instance, and, in this regard, play a strategic role in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, the first MDG. They are vehicles for literacy, learning, and the acquisition of necessary life skills, and are thus crucial for the second MDG, achieving universal primary education. They are absolutely essential for preventing HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and thus in achieving the sixth MDG. Since prevention programmers are efficient only if they are implemented in languages understood by their target audience. Lastly, they transmit indigenous knowledge on natural resource management, and thus play a 17

key role in preserving the environment as envisaged in the seventh MDG. None of these goals may be achieved without the use of vernacular languages(9). The costs of losing linguistic diversity are high and may jeopardize international cooperation to promote sustainable development, intercultural dialogue, and the achievement of the MDGs and EFA goals (10).

Maffi, Luisa. 2001. Toward the integrated protection of language and knowledge as a part of indigenous peoples' cultural heritage. Cultural Survival Quarterly 24(4):32-36. [T]he extinction crisis affecting the world's biodiversity is closely related, in its causes and consequences, to the crisis threatening the world's indigenous and traditional peoples, their languages, and their cultural traditions(32). Participants agreed that the connections between the different manifestations of the diversity of life -- biological, cultural, and linguistic -- reside in the intimate link between language and knowledge, including traditional knowledge about the environment. Language, they argued, is central to people's ability to conceptualize and understand the world and to act on it. Human culture is a powerful adaptation tool, and language both enables and conveys much cultural behavior. And while language cannot express all knowledge, beliefs, and values, it does represent the main instrument by which people elaborate, develop, and transmit such ideas. Conference participants concluded that the processes leading to the disenfranchisement of indigenous and traditional peoples -- and to the replacement of their world views, ways of life, and languages with those of dominant groups -are part and parcel of the processes leading to environmental deterioration and destruction (32-33). There is increasing concern on the part of indigenous groups about the appropriation of their native knowledge of plant (especially medicinal plants) and animal life by the wider world. Indigenous peoples the world over have increasingly identified their languages -- along with traditional knowledge, beliefs, values, ritual, folklore, crafts, and biodiversity -- as part of their cultural heritage. They see their cultures and languages as intimately linked with their lands and territories. And they consider the maintenance and continued development of their languages as an integral part of their cultural vitality (33). The concept of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) alone is insufficient to protect indigenous knowledge as reflected in endangered languages, we must also prevent erosion of those languages due to forces of languages of wider communication. New and special laws like the 1989 International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples no. 169 (ILO 169) are needed. The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), especially Articles 8j, 10c, and 18.4 is also relevant, deal[ing] with establishing appropriate agreements for the development and utilization of such knowledge, innovations and practices and the equitable sharing of benefits deriving from this utilization. The most comprehensive and advanced 18

international document produced so far for the protection of indigenous peoples' rights, including key aspects related to indigenous knowledge and languages, is the Draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (34). UNESCO has also had a significant role to play. Cultural and linguistic rights form part of human rights. It has often been noted that for indigenous peoples not knowledge per se but rather wisdom may be a goal. And in discussing the Western discourse of rights, legal scholar Lyndel Prott has asked whether thinking in terms of rights is our only, let alone our best, option. She observes: Many traditional communities think in terms of the obligations of the human community to earth and the other species on it. Perhaps the idea may be the beginning of a new normative framework for the preservation of heritage (37).

Wikipedia. 2009. Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples . See below.

United Nations. 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Adopted by United Nations General Assembly, 13 September 2007. Though it is not legally binding, the Declaration can act as a kind of soft law, influencing the behavior of nations by virtue of the firm international standard it sets. One could use its basic tenets to argue that of all the basic human rights common to all peoples of the earth to education, health, opportunity language and culture are perhaps the most fundamental, as they underlie all the rest. A communitys language holds the key to its identity and provides the chief vehicle for transmission of the vast storehouse of knowledge and custom that undergird its culture. If a groups language is permitted to pass silently out of existence without study, documentation, and attempts at revival and revitalization, that loss deprives them of their most basic sense of self and the linchpin of their individual and collective will. We cannot discriminate against such groups, but must act to promote their participation in matters that concern them and assist them in maintaining and strengthening their own institutions and traditions as preserved and transmitted through their language.

Frank, Paul. 2008. The Glory of God through the Peoples and Languages of the Earth. ms.

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It is common to talk about language and culture as barriers to the spread of the Gospel. Linguistic and cultural diversity are not barriers to Gods purposes; they are crucial elements for achieving His purposes [as reflected in Revelation 5:9 and 7:9-10] (1). [W]ere mistaken if we conclude that the diversity of languages and peoples that resulted [from the Tower of Babel] was contrary to the eternal purposes of God. Without the diversity of nations, tribes, peoples, and languages, Gods purposes are hindered, not helped. It is a tragedy whenever any person fails to trust God because he or she could not hear the Gospel in a language they could understand. It is also a tragedy when any person has to cease being who God made them including their linguistic and cultural identity in order to become a Christian (1). [NB: I do, though, think we are on shaky ground with the supposition that God made our linguistic and cultural identities: He confounded humanitys common language, but the separate developments of those initial sparks of linguistic diversity, as well as the cultural paths of the people groups, lay, after the initial confusion, entirely in human hands. As to Pauls quote in Acts 17:26-27, I do not think he is speaking literally. He begins by noting From one man: God created in Adam the seed of all human groups; he appointed the times and seasons for them and, in expelling them from Eden, sent them forth to their eventual locations on the globe. He could not have actually determined who should live exactly where, however, lest he destroy our free agency and make rebels against divine decree of any human who moves his residence. Cf. God made it a beautiful language, full of expressive power and grammatical complexity (3).] God created cultural and linguistic diversity and intends them for his glory. We need to pray and work that His will might be done on earth a diversity of peoples and languages as part of His church. I believe that God designed cultural variety in the world just as He designed a variety of gifts within the Body of Christ. Though we affirm that the Scriptures can be communicated through any and every language, it may be that not everything that could be said about God and His creation can be said equally well through any one language. In some strange way each language is necessary, both as a means for expressing a peoples unique identity and as a means for saying things about the world and about God that cannot quite be said through any other language (2). So not only do we translate the Scriptures. We also help stabilize languages that are threatened and cultures that are being eroded. We help people develop their languages so that in a changing, hostile world they can continue using their languages to express their unique identity in the face of the onslaught of dominant languages and cultures (3).

Whalen, D. H. How the study of endangered languages will revolutionize linguistics. In P.van Sterkenburg (Ed.), Linguistics today: Facing a greater challenge. Amsterdam:John Benjamins, 2004. 321-342.

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Rating: 4 Summary: The author examines on side of the two way interaction between linguistics and endangered languages, considering not the usual question of what linguistics has to offer endangered language communities, but what the study of endangered languages may offer linguistics. He highlights the burgeoning use of the internet for data publication and increased quantity and quality of data stemming from work on endangered languages. He argues that these features will spur the field to greater unity and theoretical productivity. Evaluation: Reading this article side-by-side with those of Pennycock et al. cited above makes the authors point of view seem nave in the extreme. This navet comes especially to the fore in his appraisal of internet technology; one begins to wonder whether the piece was not written in 1984 rather than 2004 for all its discussion of the new technologies available through the web. That fault aside, the discussion of the practical ways in which modern linguistic theory may be advanced through the study of endangered languages proves quite useful, especially for helping to convince a somewhat skeptical field of the value of this new subspecialty. Details: The author lists four ways in which the increasingly widespread practice of making linguistic data available online will revolutionize linguistics: 1) linguists will work from the same data rather than individual data sets; 2) the texts can be searched easily; 3) the sound files will be available and not just transcriptions; 4) work will progress on a unified ontology for linguistics (324). By ontology in the non-philosophical sense, he means a description of objects and their relationships to each other. He thinks that the rich data made available through the study of endangered languages and web publishing will permit linguists to discover the linguistic periodic table of the elements and cease being trapped in area-specific grammatical terms, like the obviative case in Algonquian, that exists nowhere outside of Algonqiuan languages. One such unified ontology project is already under way, the General Ontology for Linguistic Desciprion or GOLD funded through the NSF and working through the EMELD project. The idea behind this concept is that increased availability of better raw data will force a higher standard of descriptive adequacy (331). He notes that older archival materials, like magnetic media with or without accompanying transcriptions, present too many technical challenges for the researcher to be of much use; it is difficult or impossible to align the transcriptions with the recorded material or too difficult to extract the material from the recordings. Not only is internet publication more user friendly and less costly than other means of dissemination, it is also useful for native speaker and heritage communities as well, who are now beginning to develop strong web presences. The study of endangered languages offers particular advantages over that of unendangered languages: 1) the time scale at which we understand linguistic change will be expanded; 2) claims for universals and language acquisition will be better tested; 3) the effects of literacy can be better assessed by comparison 21

to the largely unwritten endangered language traditions; 4) the linguistic ontology will be more complete. On the first point, he notes that more material from farther flung language families will enable comparison of a larger set of relations to deepen the time scale. Note of interest: !Xu~ has 95 consonants and 24 monophthongal vowels, and a successful orthography was developed (337)! Quotes: Indeed, it is through these archives that the languages can be called sleeping rather than dead various Native American groups have used this term, as outlined in Hinton (2001) (321). Suffice it to say that language loss in the modern world seldom reflects a voluntary choice on the part of the language community (322). But for looking at more unusual languages, we are at a stage where essentially one or two linguists have access to the raw data, and everyone else gets snippets of their analysis (324-325). We also know that transcriptions, even the most narrow ones, are an idealization of the signal (326). Yet the most extreme cases of language differentiation are surely to be found in the highly divergent language families, many of which are faced with extinction as an entire family, not just a member language or two. Most of the Australian languages, for example, are moribund (331). The Australian linguistics community was energized in the early 1980s to begin a systematic recording of all the Australian languages, and this project succeeded with a thoroughness that has not been replicated elsewhere (331). [Cf. David Wilkins piece above.] Languages that invest in unusual consonant types appear to rely on them heavily (Hombert and Maddieson 1998) (335). Currently, there seems to be no pattern of language (other than the auxiliary system of reading) that requires explicit instruction (336). Writing is parasitic on speech, as we know (e.g. Coe 1992) (337). Writing makes a language more conservative and makes older forms available on a regular basis, both enriching and complicating the language environment (337). It is only when we add in the features of the typologically distant and unusual languages that our theories really get a workout (339). We have reached a stage in the study of language at which it is no longer ethical for a linguist not to consider working on an endangered language. This is 22

not to say that all linguists must work on an endangered language: There [sic] are many valid reasons why a linguist might decide that a nonendangered language is the most appropriate one to study. But not to ask the question is insupportable (340).

Hale, Ken. 1992. Language endangerment and the human value of linguistic diversity. Language 68: 35-41. In this summary piece to the general suite of articles on language endangerment and death, Hale takes the now majority view of language as cultural production, arguing A language and the intellectual productions of its speakers are often inseparable (36). His discussion details the situation of Damin, an auxiliary language of the Australian Aboriginal language Lardil, which was used only by initiated men and taught to them only once they were being initiated. Damin is truly unique phonologically, in that it has click consonants found elsewhere only in Africa, and lexically, in that each word in Damin, which corresponds to one or more Lardil words, provides an abstract name for a logically cohesive family of concepts. This is the secret to the languages being able to be learned in a day by male initiates. The intellectual treasure (40) of Damin was lost with the death of the last fluent user of the language several years ago (40). If revival were instituted, perhaps a new Damin tradition could be created and sustained, but the original could never be regained and will remain forever lost. And the desctruction of this tradition must be ranked as a disaster, comparable to the destruction of any human treasure (40).

III. Digital RecordingPlichta, Bartek and Mark Kornbluh. 2002. Digitizing speech recordings for archival purposes. Ms Discusses the theory and practice of digital recording and analog-digital conversion, concentrating on explaining why the standard DVD quality of 24 bit, 96kHz is considered a best practice. Also explains the Sampling or Nyquist Theorem (sample rate must be greater than twice the highest frequency in the signal), Dither, and Oversampling.

IV. MetadataNISO. 2004. Understanding metadata. Bethesda, MD: National Information Standards Organization. 23

Defines 3 types of metadata: descriptive, structural, and administrative. Descriptive metadata provides a description of the material for the purposes of discovery and identification. Structural metadata indicates how the material is put together, what its components are, how it is ordered, etc. Administrative metadata provides information to help manage the material, like when it was created, file type, how it was created, other technical aspects of its production, etc. There are several subsets of administrative metadata: Rights management metadata provides information about the intellectual property rights involved in the material and governs access to it. Preservation metadata contain information required to archive and preserve the material.

Simons, Gary, Steven Bird, and Joan Spanne. 2008. OLAC metadata usage guidelines. Open Language Archives Community. Defines all of the elements of the Dublin Core metadata standard and describes and illustrates how they apply to language resources. This is really a document aimed at archivists and data interchange implementers.

Bergqvist, Henrik. 2007. The role of metadata for translation and pragmatics in language documentation. In Peter K. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description 4:163-173. London: SOAS. Language documentation should be accompanied by a thick description of a non-linguistic nature (Abstract 1) or metadata, providing information about the totality of the situation of the recording. This information may well be superfluous to the actual linguistic analysis, but due to the archival concerns of documentary linguistics, it is reasonable to request for the purposes of preservation and management.

Society for Ethnomusicology, 2001. A manual for documentation fieldwork and preservation for ethnomusicologists, 2nd edition. Chapter 1, "Documentation," pages 5-10. Lists specific information that needs to be recorded in metadata. Very basic. Spanne, Joan. 2008. Metadata: Why, What and How (the Who is You). Presentation for Audio and Video Techniques, GIAL, 29 July 2008. Briefly describes five types of metadata: descriptive or discovery, administrative, structural, technical, rights. Discusses some details from archivists viewpoint. Definitions not really clear. 24

V. Sharable DocumentationHimmelmann, Nikolaus. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36:165191 Argues for separating what, previously, were considered two parts of descriptive linguistics: collection of primary data through recordings and linguistic analysis of that data. Thus there is the field of documentary linguistics which engages in documentary activity and produces a language documentation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the field of descriptive linguistics, which engages in descriptive activity and produces a language description. The former of these two fields may either be conceived fairly moderately as a distinct domain within the larger framework of descriptive linguistics (language documentation as edited field notes) or, more radically, as an entirely separate and methodologically distinct field, for which language documentation can be characterized as radically expanded text collection. This latter proposal seeks to reverse the interdependency of these two fields: conventionally, documentary activity was seen as ancillary to descriptive activity; now descriptive activity is seen as ancillary to the documentary activity, i.e. part of a broad set of techniques applied in compiling and presenting a useful and representative corpus of primary documents of the linguistic practices found in a given speech community (2). The term descriptive is primarily analytic. It became associated with the process of collecting primary data through its historical opposition to historical/comparative and generative/explanatory/formal linguistics. Table 1 (p. 4) presents these oppositions usefully. But the results, procedures, and methodological issues attendant upon data collection and analysis differ considerably (see Table 2, p. 5). That said, it is also true that, in order to carry out either task, one must perform transcriptions and translation, which necessarily involves phonetic, phonological, and morphological analysis. Because of this overlap, the tendency has been to blur the distinctions between descriptive and documentary linguistics. Another key reason for regarding the two activities separately, however, involves the fact that a collection, without analysis, might well be useful to a variety of other fields and even to the language community itself, whereas an analysis without detailed data collection would not. Also, so long as both collection and analysis are lumped together, data collection will be inevitably undervalued and neglected. A clear separation between documentation and description will ensure that the collection and presentation of primary data receive the theoretical and practical attention they deserve (7). A language description aims at the record of a language, conceived of as a system of abstract elements, constructions and rules which constitute the invariant underlying structure of the utterances observable in a speech community (9). A language documentation aims at the record of the linguistic practices and traditions of a speech community (9, italics original). The latter of these two is much more comprehensive. Because it prepares for such a comprehensive record of potential use to a broad range of disciplines, the theoretical underpinnings of language documentation have to be 25

broad, drawing on a broad variety of language-related (sub-) disciplines (10). One of the major theoretical challenges for documentary linguistics, then, is the task of synthesizing a coherent framework for language documentation from all of these disciplines (11).

Woodbury, Anthony C. 2003. Defining language documentation. In Peter K. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description 1:35-51. London: SOAS. A survey of the history of documentary linguistics with predictions as to its future. Documentation is as old as the early 20th century structuralist shift toward the synchronic perspective and the Historical Particularism of Franz Boas and Boas student Leonard Bloomfield. Nevertheless, in the past 15 years, there has been a shift toward language documentation becoming a field in its own right, largely as a result of advancements in technology. It has brought about a revolution in both the magnitude and the quality of linguistic documentation (2). The shift also resulted from increasing emphasis on diversity as a central, organizing question in linguistics (2, bold original). Concentrations on social diversity, the humanistic value of language as critical to intellectual endeavor, and endangerment have also helped to effect the shift. Endangerment was not a new concept, but Ken Hales piece in Language 1992 and other similar calls to action helped place it front and center. Led to development of major organizations and funding sources: ELF, FEL, Volkswagons Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen, and Lisbet Rausing Charitable Funds Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS. There was also considerable work within endangered language communities, such as the indigenous language immersion movement with the concept of Language Nests. The key shift in conception that underlies language documentation is that it is discourse-centered (Sherzer 1990) That [sic] is, direct representation of naturally occurring discourse is the primary project, while description and analysis are contingent, emergent byproducts which grow alongside primary documentation but are always changeable and parasitic on it (5). In the past, the documentation was epiphenomenal in terms of the whole project (5) of language description. In this model, though, [d]ata itself isnt independently theorized, and is ultimately neglected on a number of theoretical and practical levels (6). Data needed to be theorized as documentation. Explanatory and analytical material is coming to be seen as annotating the documentation, rather than the pyramidal model of older days that placed grammars and dictionaries at the apex as though the endpoint of documentation. The corpus of words and texts should be augmented with recordings of the native community discussing the recorded words and texts, such that a kind of metacorpus is established. So too a dialectical relationship is established between corpus and apparatus: they inform each other. One of the chief challenges in documentary linguistics is the wide range of agendas 26

surrounding language documentation, especially within the native communities. No child left behind had a chilling effect on enthusiasm for Cupik immersion programs in Chevak , Alaska. Enumerates some agreed-upon characteristics of a good corpus; it is: diverse, large, ongoing, distributed (i.e. spread out among many different contributors), opportunistic, ethical, with transparent (i.e. anyone can pick them up and understand and use them at any time) and preservable, ethical, and portable materials. Documentary linguistics is also coming to include archiving as a vital part of its endeavors. Ends with some observations drawn from his experiences at UT Austin regarding training and coursework at the Ph.D. level.

Boerger, Brenda H. 2011. To BOLDly go where no one has gone before. Language Documentation and Conservation 5:208-233 Report on several documentary projects that utilized the BOLD method, their results and some modifications/refinements that could be made in BOLD as a consequence. Argues that BOLD should be required of future students since the pace of language loss far exceeds that of new documentary projects: something with BOLDs time sensitivity will have to be incorporated into fieldwork. BOLDs three distinctive characteristics are that its basic, oral, and strives for breadth first, not depth. And the documenter need not be a linguist per se, but a trained paralinguist who may even be a member of the community under study. Notes that the careful speech component of BOLDs oral transcriptions can aid phonological analysis and identifying word breaks. It also facilitates written transcription. Also briefly discusses the Extended Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) which is used to assess language vitality. Waiting until we can do it all and do it right, by whatever definition we use, will not result in corpora which capture the speech practices of communities around the world before they disappear (231). Suggests that use of BOLD method to gather a documentary corpus be a requirement of graduate linguistics training in the same way that study of a non-Indo-European language often is. Ends by defining a further sub-field of conservationist linguistics which would concentrate on language revitalization which falls outside the widely quoted definition of documentary linguistics formulated by Himmelmann (1998).

VI. Globalizing ContextTollefson, J. 2006. Critical Theory in Language Policy. In Thomas Ricento (ed.), An Introduction to Language Policy Theory and Method, pp. 42-59. Oxford: Blackwell.

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A critical approach to language policy acknowledges that policies often create and sustain various forms of social inequality, and that policy-makers usually promote the interest of dominant social groups (42). Tollefsons research examines the role of language policies in social, political, and economic inequality, with the aim of developing policies that reduce various forms of inequality (43). This activist research champions language revitalization and explicitly denigrates claimed stances of objectivity or distance from subjects. CLP also looks at the invisible, ideological processes by virtue of which social inequality can be made to seem the natural condition of social systems. Two assumptions from critical theory underlie CLP: 1) that structural categories like race, gender, and class are central explanatory factors in all social life (44) and 2) that examination of research methodology and epistemology are inseparable from ethical standards and commitments to social justice. Even the word research is fraught with problematic associations with European imperialism and colonialism in the minds of the colonized. CLP is especially concerned with the roles mother-tongue speakers should play in research and how native communities create and sustain preferred forms of knowledge. Most CLP researchers are committed to involving the language speakers themselves in policy decisions and participation in the process. There is also a key focus on the ideas of power as implicit in all human relationships, struggle for social justice, colonization as a mental as well as physical process of encroachment by market mechanisms and bureaucratic control on the realm of family and other primary interaction, hegemony and ideology that are built into social systems and become internalized as common sense, and resistance in terms of the way in which ethnolinguistic minorities may undermine the basic logic of dominant social systems by sustaining alternative social systems (48). Two special approaches to language policy pioneered by CLP are the historical-structural approach (which emphasizes the influence of social and historical factors on language policy and use and assumes that language policy research is inescapably political (49)) and governmentality (which shifts focus to the indirect acts of governing that shaped individual and group language behavior.the techniques and practices of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, and other state authorities at the micro-level (49-50). CLP places economic concerns and the nation-state and all the accompanying issues at the center of research into language policy, as well as developing rationales for language maintenance and revitalization.

Lewis, M. Paul. 2008. The what and why of language-based development. Chapter 1 of an in-progress Handbook on Managing Language-based Development. Language unifies communities and distinguishes them from other communities. The connection between language and identity is so tight that often groups are known by the name of their language or their language by the name of the group or 28

the place where they live. Provides definition of minority language community: a group with a shared identity where the language of identity is overshadowed by one or more dominant languages (2). MLCs lack adequate capacity to maintain the unifying and communicative uses of language for the long run, which puts them at a disadvantage in a number of ways. They have limited participation in the political system, limited opportunities for formal education, limited economic resources, limited chances of holding onto their language and culture. Minority language communities face significant obstacles in meeting their ongoing needs in all areas of life (3). MLCs have limited access to information because it is unavailable in a language they have proficiency in. Most MLCs score low on Fishmans Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) that provides a way to assess the vitality of language and culture maintenance. All language communities need to be able to transmit life-crucial knowledge, (3), which includes information, skills and values relating to all areas of life that a community needs in order to create and sustain its own well being [sic] (4). Life-crucial knowledge also includes knowledge of identity and heritage; knowledge for dealing with political, economic, health, and spiritual problems; and external knowledge that will expand and improve the communitys way of life. Minority language communities are threatened if they lack the capacity and resources to transmit life-crucial knowledge (4). Argues that even though transmitting traditional knowledge and gaining external knowledge both involve processes of translation that may do harm to the nuances expressed, nonetheless gaining external knowledge does not have to mean the relegation of the heritage language to museum mode (5) as being deemed of no use in communicating about the complexities of modern life. Minority language communities deal with multiple identities and multiple languages and must determine which languages they will use for each (5). Next he turns to a discussion of language planning, which usually deals with political, economic, social problems that are not language problems per se but can be solved through a change in language use or structure or both. Language planning is overt, directed, purposeful, language change brought about in order to solve some identified problem (6). Language planning consists of three major components: status planning (having to do with language policy), corpus planning (having to with language form) and acquisition planning (having to do with users of the language(s)). The major criticism of language planning is that it tends to be undertaken and controlled by those in power and does not build capacity among the MLC to solve their own problems going forward. It has been called planning for inequality by critics, and referred to negatively as language (or social) engineering (7). A preferable methodology with which to address the needs of MLCs is language-based development, which is designed to be more participatory and collaborative. Rather than the top-down approach associated with language planning, language-based development moves from the bottom-up, starting with the desires and aspirations of the MLCs. It is holistic, results oriented, languageaware, empowering, and works from the inside out and bottom up. Since the transmission of Life-Crucial Knowledge operates across geographic space, through 29

social space, and over time, Language-based development must take these dimensions into account. The goals identified by the MLC for the scope of their efforts to sustain the transmission of Life-Crucial Knowledge fall into 3 general categories: sustainable identity, sustainable oracy, sustainable literacy. The choice of which category or categories to pursue or how depends on the GIDS level the MLC is at or desires to be at. The Miami nation prefers not to think of their language as extinct, but as sleeping (11). Some of the scholarly literature has used the term minoritized (12) language to refer to MLCs so as to emphasize the role of disempowerment, lack of resources, and unequal access to education have played. An on-going debate in linguistics has even begun to question the very notion of what a language is, preferring to think in terms of a discourse that changes; its continuity and systematicity reflect merely the partial setting or sedimentation of frequently used forms into temporary subsystems (13). In this view, language, as traditionally conceived, is a myth. Perhaps a more valid version of this viewpoint is the notion of viewing language as being something more dynamic and less a static object, a core of generally shared features with increasing amounts of variation the further you move from the core. What we have generally identified as a language and thought of as an isolated unit, is seen through the lens of contact linguistics not to be an entirely homogenous unit and often has fuzzy edges. Thus, language changes over time as the linguistic markers of a particularly valued identity gain in usage (and become more and more sedimented into common practice) while those of less desirable identities fade away and are forgotten (13). [L]inguistic differences are in fact the realization of differences in identity and are manipulated to re-inforce and dynamically construct an identity (13). Fishman was adamant that language restoration and revitalization must proceed through his GIDS scale one step at a time in order to prove effective; no steps could be skipped. According to Fishman (1991), language is inextricably linked to culture in three ways: indexically, symbolically, synecdochally.

Bonk, Jonathan. 2000. Engaging Escobar ... And Beyond. In William D. Taylor (ed.), Global Missiology for the 21st Century: The Iguassu Dialogue, pp. 47-54. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Deals with global, multi-ethnic Christianity in the post-globalization world. Cites Lammin Sannehs Translating the Message and deals with the shift in Christianity from North to South, rich to poor (except for the money center) and the kaleidoscopicvariety (48) that sometimes endangers unity. Our Scriptures remind us that God has always found it difficult to work with or through comfortably secure people (48). Only the imitable gospel, incarnate at the level of person to person, will spare us from the pitfalls of propaganda and jingoism that sometimes substitute for genuine Christian mission (49). Information exchange is not mission because it can remain aloof from personal experience and feeling. Technologically 30

reliant communication can thus become a distancing power that undermines real understanding, solidarity, and commitment one to another (49). Suggests that the modern term develop is only the most threadbare of disguises for a time when it was unabashedly assumed that a part of the missionarys task was to civilize (50). Discusses the globalization juggernaut (50) and its symptoms: North-South divide, increase in wealth gap between richest and poorest, imbalance of resources.

Ricento, Thomas, Introduction, Revisiting the Mother-Tongue Question in Language Policy, Planning, and Politics. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 154 (2002), 1-9. Rating: 3 Summary: Beginning with statements from a UNESCO report in 1953 and German linguist Leo Weisgerber to the effect that mother-tongue is integral to identity and necessary to proper education, this collection examines the theoretical and practical problems that attach to the generally supposed linkage between language, culture, and identity. The fact of individuals claiming multiple mother-tongues, raised bi- or multilingual, presents challenges to the general view. The fact of competing claims of mother-tongue groups to social, economic, and educational dominance likewise raises practical problems for this view. As certain of the authors in the collection show, policies of education in vernaculars have served both to empower and oppress, or rather, even as they empower one group, they oppress another. Thus the collection examines the political, social, and ideological dimensions of MT. Evaluation: As any good introduction should, this brief note proposes some substantial food for thought, significantly problematizing the facile credo found so often in literature on minority and endangered languages that language is the key to identity and the lynchpin of cultural survival. The discussion is necessarily superficial, serving only to spark interest to spur the reader on to consider the articles in the collection. Details: The introduction gives a brief overview of the contents and discussion of each article in the collection. It also nicely counterbalances the UNESCO and Leo Weisgerber statements quoted at its outset with one from Palestinian-American Edward Said quoted at its end. True to his mixed ethnic and linguistic heritage, Said affirms that multiple identities and heteroglossia are inextricable grounds of the modern condition. Quotes: How might we conceptualize the identities of persons who command multiple languages and who have acquired them at different developmental points? If such identities may be multilayered, partial, transitory, and context-specific, then surely this has some relevance for the MT/identity equation and, at the very least, 31

should make us question the universalist claims in the 1953 UNESCO Report and from the writings of German linguist Leo Weisgerber above (2). Herein lies the chief conceptual and practical challenge of the contemporary world: how to promote social and economic integration of all ethnolinguistic groups while maintaining true linguistic and cultural pluralism (3). Certainly choice is a key element in determining the fairness and benefits of language policies concerned with language status; if a minority wishes to preserve ifs language, it should, in principle, have that opportunity (8; emphasis original). [B]oth cultural and linguistic continuity and cultural and linguistic adaptation are features of human societies and individuals (8; emphasis original). Perhaps we need to distance ourselves from reifications such as mother tongue (and even language, as Pennycock suggests in his article) as a way to find new space for discourse on language, ethnicity, and identity (8). No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things (8; quoting Said (1994:408)). Pennycock, Alastair. Mother Tongues, governmentality, and protectionism, Revisiting the Mother-Tongue Question in Language Policy, Planning, and Politics. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 154 (2002), 11-28. Rating: 3 Summary: Essentially a deconstructionist enterprise, the article problematizes the notion of mother-tongue, and indeed language in general, insofar as both have served the essentializing agendas of colonial administrations bent on compartmentalizing and controlling ethnic groups. The author explores the concept of disinventing language to place emphasis on the pan-ethnic and fluid character of speech practices. Evaluation: The perspective offered in this piece is intriguing, even if the author offers few solutions to the myriad problems he raises. The article provides a valuable counterbalance to the more traditional perspectives on language preservation and identity. At the very least, it encourages us to rethink our blithe repetitions of the party line in this relatively new enterprise of language documentation and revitalization. Details: The author examines how vernacular education policies in British Malaya and Hong Kong played a role in governmentality, that is the use of discources, 32

educational practices, and language use in enforcing government policy and rule. He also relies heavily on the analysis by Sinfree Makoni of language policy in South Africa, speaking of languages as inventions of colonial governments and missionaries. Quotes: While on the face of things we may be fairly content to assume the existence of languages because we all speak something and it differs to various degrees from the way others speak, on another level the problems with