CRASSH

Language Endangerment: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization

Conference report

Most of the world's languages have diminishing numbers of speakers and are on the brink of falling silent. Currently around the globe, scholars are collaborating with members of indigenous communities to document and describe these endangered languages and cultures. Mindful that their work will be used by future speech communities to learn, teach, and revitalize their languages, scholars face new challenges in the way they gather materials and in the way they present their findings. The First Cambridge International Conference on Language Endangerment discussed current efforts to record, collect, and archive endangered languages in writing, sound, and video that will support future language learners and speakers.

Documentation is of critical and immediate importance, and is often considered one of the main tasks of the field linguist. Future revitalization efforts may succeed or fail on the basis of the quality and range of material gathered, and yet the process may be rapid and dependent on conscious decisions by linguists and language workers who may be analyzing the form of a language for the first time, and codifying it in dictionaries and grammars. Written documentation of course not only aids the process of standardization but also serves important needs and functions within a community in support of language maintenance such as providing the basis for pedagogical materials in schools and helping to create a community's sense of identity.  However, indigenous communities and scholars of endangered languages are beginning to realise that the rapid and often artificial nature of this process can have negative effects - politically, linguistically, and culturally - which feed into issues relating to education and, ultimately, language revitalization.

In addition to the opportunity of sharing experiences with a network of linguists, it is hoped that participants left the conference with a new understanding of the topic, innovative ideas for documentation and pedagogy within their own linguistic contexts, and a renewed vigour to implement what they learnt in their own language situations.  

The response to the Call For Papers for this conference was overwhelming: with 84 abstracts submitted for a one-day meeting. Both plenary talks were given by academics of the highest international reputation in the field of language endangerment. A capacity number of delegates registered for the conference (a considerable number of potential delegates had to be turned away in the end because of considerations of space). Moreover, BBC Radio 4 devoted a whole programme to the conference (‘Word of Mouth’, broadcast on March 29th 2011). This display of enthusiasm from the  international academic community and the media has underlined the opportunity we have to establish Cambridge as a centre of excellence in this discipline.

In terms of publication plans, I have already been approached by Peter Lang, who have offered to publish an edited book based on the papers given in this conference. However, as the subvention required was high and no funds for this purpose are available to me, I am currently sending out proposals to other publishers.

In view of the popularity of this conference within the international academic community, I am currently planning a Second Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment (to take place in 2012) and I have already applied to CRASSH for funding in respect of this. For the sake of coherence with respect of published output, this second conference seek will to promote interdisciplinary exchange on a separate, though complementary, area to that explored in the first conference. The proposed second conference will therefore focus on the timely topic of methodologies for analysing and documenting endangered languages.

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