Chapter 5 – The ethnography of language and language documentation
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enterprise, and normative practices are negotiated and in turn facilitate ne-
gotiation and mutuality. The “communities of practice” in which documen-
tary linguists work are, then, different from the “speech communities” of
the classic ethnography of language. They may be constituted only for par-
ticular purposes, they may be ephemeral, and they can form and reform,
being salient at certain times and places and irrelevant in others. Further-
more, single individuals may belong to several of these, and their practices
and routines may overlap to some degree.
Wenger (1998) found that successful communities of practice exhibit
certain properties that are highly relevant to the documentary linguistic
enterprise. These include
1. rapid propagation of innovation;
2. jargon and shortcuts to communication;
3. the development of a certain very local insider perspective on the world;
4. a repertoire of insider resources and identifying markers such as jokes,
stories, and specific tools and representations.
Specifically linguistic variables such as phonological elements, lexical
items, and routinized phrases are a very important part of the emerging
normative order within communities of practice. That is, linguistic re-
sources evolve within communities of practice and may be quite specific to
these.
The problem for the documentary linguist is to be aware of these emer-
gent properties, and to try to remain conscious not only of her own role in
such emergence, but of what consultants are doing as well. To think
through thoroughly the implications of the evolving theory of the commu-
nity of practice for the documentary project lies beyond the scope of this
chapter. But I will advance a couple of simple and suggestive examples
from my fieldwork with Cupeño, undertaken more than 40 years ago when
not even the tiniest ray of social-constructionist light had yet penetrated my
American structuralist training. I spent nearly all of my time working with
a single consultant, Roscinda Nolasquez, who was then in her mid-sixties –
about the age I am as I write this. I thought of her as very old. We spent
hundreds of hours together, and became very intimate, a classic community
of practice of two, in which marginal members occasionally participated for
brief periods.
My first example of an emergent property within our community is the
fact that my fieldnotes, to my extreme embarrassment today, are very messy
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Jane H. Hill
and often do not have glosses, in spite of the fact that I had some training in
field methods. This is an excellent example of a “rapidly innovated short-
cut.” In 1962 I was immersed in the language and had no trouble under-
standing anything in the notes, and really didn’t need to systematically
gloss everything, and could use ellipses for predictable (to me, then) parts
of utterances. And of course this was also fine with Roscinda Nolasquez,
who was very quick-witted and did not enjoy waiting while I carefully
wrote things down and glossed them. We had developed a sort of rapid
work rhythm and my sloppy note-taking was one of its dimensions. And I
note that I’m not the only person who ever did this. Shortly before his un-
timely death in 2001, Ken Hale turned over his field notes on Mountain
Pima from the late 1950s and early 1960s to my graduate student, Luis Bar-
ragan, who works on the language. Luis was very moved when Ken offered
him the notes, and awed when he discovered that only six pages into the
notes Hale, who of course was famous as a linguistic savant, stopped writing
glosses. I assure you that my glosses for Cupeño are fairly dense for many
more pages than six, but after two or three weeks of work they became
scantier and scantier. This is exactly what we would expect from findings
about communities of practice, where shortcuts emerge very rapidly, but of
course what it means is that my notes (and Ken Hale’s) are now very diffi-
cult to use. I was so immersed in my local formation of community in the
summers of 1962 and 1963 that I did not think about how, forty years down
the line, there would be nobody alive to check the odd form that I really am
not sure about any more. So one of the lessons is that documentary linguists
really do need to keep in mind, in the face of the profound force of local
social construction in the linguist-consultant relationship, that they belong
to a larger community with its own needs.
And of course consultants are contributing to the emerging structuration
of the community of practice and its products. To discuss one of these con-
tributions by Roscinda Nolasquez, I need to give you some background on
Cupeño demonstratives. Cupeño has three demonstratives: i’i, a clear
proximal, axwesh, a clear distal, and a mystery demonstrative et. In writing
my reference grammar (Hill 2005) over the last few years, I had to figure
out what on earth the mystery demonstrative meant. What I determined was
that et and axwesh are contrasted as distal-proximal and distal-obviative.
Part of the evidence was that only axwesh appeared in narrative, except for
passages of reported speech, in which et could appear. The other bit of evi-
dence was that et was absolutely ubiquitous in elicited sentences, where
axwesh never appeared. For instance, in one section of field notes I was