26
Nikolaus P. Himmelmann
data. Chapter 3 includes suggestions for getting started with the actual lin-
guistic documentation work in the field.
The next eight chapters (Chapters 5 to 12) pertain to the recording and
processing of primary linguistic data from an anthropological and linguistic
point of view. The first three of these chapters (Chapters 5 to 7, but also a
considerable part of Chapter 8) are primarily concerned with the issue of
how and what to document, given the goal of creating a lasting and multi-
functional record of a language. Chapter 5 provides an introduction to a
cultural and ethnographic understanding of language. This is essential for
the success of a documentation project, not only with regard to the neces-
sity of being able to identify the types of communicative events that should
be recorded, but also for being able to successfully interact within a speech
community which has a different set of norms of interaction. In the latter
regard, Chapter 5 complements and expands Chapters 2 and 3.
Chapter 6 addresses the issue of how to access and represent meta-
linguistic knowledge, focusing primarily on lexical knowledge. Chapter 7
briefly discusses the kinds of data needed for prosodic analysis, while
Chapter 8 reports on the demands of anthropologists for language docu-
mentations, which complements the discussion of this topic in Chapter 5.
Chapter 8 also addresses the issue of ethnographically relevant annota-
tion and commentary and thus forms a group with the next four chapters
(Chapters 9 to 12) all of which are concerned with the part of a documenta-
tion called “apparatus” in Table 1. That is, they deal with the processing of
primary data necessary for them to become useful and accessible to a broad
range of users. While Chapters 8 and 9 provide an overview of the basic
structure and various practical aspects of ethnographic and linguistic anno-
tation and commentary, respectively, the following two chapters address
some more specific issues with regard to the written representation of re-
corded communicative events. Chapter 10 is concerned with one major
aspect of transcription, namely, the need to segment the continuous flow of
spoken language into smaller units, in particular words and intonations
units. Issues relating to the development of a practical orthography which
can be used for the written representation of the recordings, for educational
materials, etc., and which is acceptable and accessible to the speech com-
munity are discussed in Chapter 11. The final chapter in this part of the
book, Chapter 12, discusses the structure and format of the sketch grammar
which is part of the overall apparatus of the documentation, intended to
facilitate access to the primary data themselves as well as the grammatical
information to be found in sessions and lexical database.
Chapter 1 – Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for?
27
The
last part of the book, consisting of the final three chapters, relates to the
long-term perspectives of a documentation, in particular, archiving issues
and its use in language maintenance. Apart from an obvious focus on tech-
nological issues, the main concern of Chapter 13 on “Archiving challenges”
is a critical review of the different interests and goals of the three major
groups involved in the archiving process: the donators (the people handing
material to the archive), the archivists (the people running and maintaining
the archive), and the users of archival sources. Chapter 14 takes up one
particularly critical issue in long-term preservation, i.e. the changing stan-
dards in character and text structure encoding which very easily render
digitally-stored information uninterpretable. Finally, Chapter 15 focuses on
speech communities as potential users and argues that there is a need for
elaborate and creative concepts for mobilizing primary data, i.e. creating
language resources from archival data which are of interest and use to a
given community.
There are a number of important topics which actually should also be
dealt with in a book such as the present one but which unfortunately and for
reasons beyond the control of the editors could not be included at this point.
In particular, the following three topics are also of critical importance to
language documentation (see the book’s website for additional and up-to-
date information on these and other topics).
–
One major aspect of linguistic interactions which has to be attended to
in documentations are so-called paralinguistic features, in particular ges-
ture. The recent textbook on gesture by Kendon (2004) provides a thor-
ough general introduction to this topic. See also Section 2.5 in Chapter 9
for a brief note on paralinguistics.
–
There is no chapter on the basics of producing high-quality audio and
video recordings. While this topic in part involves a lot of technological
aspects which change rather rapidly and thus would in any event not
have been included in this book, there is a need to be aware of what de-
fines good recordings. In addition to the book’s website, see the Lan-
guage Archiving Newsletter and
the DoBeS and ELDP websites for
relevant pointers and links.
–
Apart from the kind of mobilization of primary data for language main-
tenance purposes discussed in Chapter 15, there are also more traditional,
but equally important contributions that a language documentation can
make to language maintenance efforts. These include, in particular, the
development of teaching materials in the documented variety. See von
Gleich (2005) for a brief discussion and references.