Chapter 3 – Fieldwork and community language work
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2. The two perspectives of language documentation
Assuming that both parties have agreed on producing a documentation of
the language, comprising recordings with transcriptions and translations, a
dictionary and a grammar, they still do not share much common ground.
On the contrary, their views differ with respect to the most relevant issues:
the choice of speech genres to be recorded, the content of the recordings,
the choice of orthography, the format of the texts resulting from the record-
ings, and the content and format of the dictionary and the grammar.
2.1. Speech genres
From the linguist’s point of view, a language documentation ideally con-
sists of a large variety of speech genres ranging from ritual language and
formal speeches, to casual gossip (see Chapter 1). Local language workers
take a different point of view. Gossip, for instance, generally not only ap-
pears unsuitable for school materials, but also socially inappropriate, and
the knowledge of the ritual language may be restricted to the holders of
chiefly titles. In order to avoid the impression of being intrusive, the lin-
guist should be sensitive to the people’s attitudes, and be content with what
they are prepared to offer. For a detailed discussion on rules of conduct, see
Chapter 2.
2.2. Content of recordings
The same applies to the content of the recordings. The ideas of the linguist
or anthropologist may not meet with the approval of the local language
workers. An additional potential complication lies in the fact that local lan-
guage workers may well disagree among themselves. While some people
would like to preserve the old legends because they are no longer transmit-
ted to the younger generations, others may argue that they belong to the
“dark ages”, and are unsuitable for children’s education. The researcher
should try to avoid becoming involved in debates on such matters of prin-
ciple – their outcome might be counterproductive – but simply try to convey
the message that the community’s oral literature will be lost forever unless
it is recorded now, and that the community may well later regret its loss. A
list of ethnographically interesting topics that might be suggested to the
speech community is discussed in Chapter 8.
70
Ulrike Mosel
2.3. The format
Speaking and writing are conceptually different activities, and so is a lan-
guage in its spoken and written form. For the scientific documentation of a
language it would suffice to render all recordings utterance by utterance in
a phonetic transcription with a translation, and the metadata that explain all
relevant circumstances of the recording. This is, however, not necessarily
what indigenous speech communities want.
For language maintenance measures and educational purposes, tran-
scriptions are not regarded as suitable because they usually contain hesita-
tion phenomena, speech and factual errors, repetitions, etc. They need to be
edited. But these edited versions differ in many respects from oral literature
in written form. In fact, they represent a quite different kind of language to
the oral narrative in respect to its physical nature, its conceptualization, its
discourse structure, its phraseology, its grammar, and its lexicon. Conse-
quently, such educational materials may introduce a new form of the lan-
guage (or at least type of text) into the community, hence arguably changing
the language and the culture of language use. For this reason, it might be
argued that their value for language maintenance and the preservation of
cultural identity is doubtful, as the written form of the language will be
heavily influenced by the dominant language and culture (Foley 2003).
Undeniably, the written language developed for educational purposes will
be different from the spoken one, but the real question is whether one
should deny the community’s desire to have reading materials in their lan-
guage. Surely if the community expresses such a wish, it is the linguist’s
obligation to provide all the assistance she can. Language documentation
and language maintenance do not mean preserving the language untouched
like a fossil in a museum. In fact, language purism can be most harmful to
endangered languages (Florey 2004). In creating an authentic literature that
can be rooted in oral traditions (though this is not a prerequisite), the lin-
guist can encourage and assist the people to find their own ways of devel-
oping new modes of expression, rather than taking the written dominant
language as a model (see below the section on editing texts).
Such somewhat artificially created text editions are in fact innovative
communicative events and may lead to a change of the language’s struc-
tures (for a brief account of such changes, see Raible 1994). However, they
are not useless for future linguistic research. Provided that the linguists do
the right job, they reflect the native editor’s linguistic competence, and the
expressive potential of the language, and thus are a genuine object of lin-
Chapter 3 – Fieldwork and community language work
71
guistic research. Therefore, these edited versions deserve the linguist’s at-
tention and should also be archived and accompanied by metadata, transla-
tions, and comments on their language and content.
2.4. Orthography
While linguists as second language learners often prefer a phonological
orthography that allows them to correctly pronounce words they do not
know, native readers often want a more morphologically-based orthography
that just allows them to quickly recognize the words in silent reading. Or-
thographical issues are often of marginal interest for linguists, but they are
very important to the speech community (see Chapter 11).
2.5. Dictionary
Dictionary making is the area where the linguists and the community have
the most divergent interests (Hinton and Weigel 2002). As an instrument of
language maintenance and as a resource for keeping the cultural heritage in
memory, the community’s dictionary will contain more encyclopedic in-
formation than the linguists’ dictionary, and thus also meet the interests of
ethnographers (see Chapter 8). Furthermore, the linguists’ dictionary con-
tains grammatical information such as the indication of parts of speech,
details on pronunciation, inflection, and derivation that are irrelevant for
the speech community as long as the language is vital. As nobody can pre-
dict how long a language keeps its vitality, the community should accept
the presence of this kind of information. It should, however, be presented in
a way that does not impede the accessibility of the dictionary by native
speakers (see Chapter 6).
3. Setting up the project team
In fieldwork manuals, you can find sections like “Selecting an informant”
(Vaux and Cooper 1999: 7), or a list of qualities an ideal “informant”
should have (cf. Kibrik 1977: 54–56). But most of the time, linguists can-
not “select” the local language workers any more than the language com-
munity can “select” a linguist from outside. Rather, the linguist will work
with people who were chosen by others or who offered themselves to work
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