CRASSH

Language Endangerment: Methodologies and New Challenges

Plenary Speakers

Tjeerd de Graaf (Frisian Academy, The Netherlands): The Use of Sound Archives for the Documentation and Maintenance of Siberian Endangered Languages and Cultures

In this contribution a report is presented about several projects devoted to the study of endangered languages and cultures of the Russian Federation. Work on the reconstruction technology for old sound recordings found in archives in St. Petersburg has made it possible to compare languages still spoken in the proposed research area to the same languages as they were spoken more than half a century ago.

We have prepared a catalogue of the existing recordings, and a phono- and video-library of recorded stories related to the folklore, singing and oral traditions of some minority peoples in the Russian Federation, in particular some Uralic Siberian peoples. For this purpose the existing sound recordings in archives have been used together with the results obtained from new fieldwork expeditions.

The aim of our  projects is to re-record the materials on sound carriers according to up-to date technology and store them in a safe place together with the metadata. The storage facility provided by the project will modernise the possible archiving activities in the Russian Federation and bring them up-to-date with the present world standards. In this presentation we shall consider some examples of data in the archives, such as the historical sound recordings which in 1935 Wolfgang Steinitz made of the Hanty language and folklore.

The projects are related to the work of the Foundation for Siberian Cultures, which has been established in 2010. The idea for this foundation emerged from many years of research with the peoples of the North in the Russian Federation and from initiatives for the preservation of their cultures. The aims of the foundation are: the preservation of indigenous languages, the knowledge (especially ecological knowledge) expressed in them, and the preservation and further enhancement of art and craft traditions of indigenous peoples. Learning tools and teaching materials by and for indigenous communities may help to counteract the forces bringing about the loss of cultural diversity and the dissolution of local and ethnic identities. Relevant materials have been and will be produced together with local experts using modern technologies. Exhibitions, cultural exchanges by means of tours of artists and workshops, as well as conferences serve to enhance mutual understandings of peoples with different cultural backgrounds and encourage valuable and productive dialogues between them. A digital library and ethnographic collections on the world wide web provide above all to indigenous communities open access to relevant scholarly resources and research materials

(see: www.kulturstiftung-sibirien.de) 

Nicholas Ostler (The Foundation for Endangered Languages): Endangered languages in the New Multi-lingual Order: Per Genus et Differentiam

In a world where monolingual dominance of English is rapidly peaking, and technology provides a variety of means to navigate among languages, as well as to record and analyse them, the question arises of how endangered languages can participate and benefit.

Evidently the “Holy Trinity” (grammar, dictionary, corpus of texts) is unchanged.  In addition, we have video  and audio documentation systems, with annotation on tiers. (Historically, motivation for this documentation was primarily for religious missions.) There are also new Atlases of Languages emerging. All of these explicitly support human understanding of the languages.

But there are also self-organizing systems, which are derived from the statistical processing of language information.  These are generating transcriptions and translations through mass correlation of corpora. Could endangered languages be left out of these developments, through lack of sufficient available data?

In practice, their small data sets are sometimes supplemented by similarities with related languages: so for example, Yiddish can be illuminated through systematic use of its relationship with standard High German. This can be seen as an instance of the age-old Aristotelian technique of explanation per genus et differentiam: a benign, and very necessary way of re-inventing the wheel, or rather re-applying wheels which have been laboriously formed elsewhere.

The net effect of this is a move towards a profoundly more egalitarian, and comprehensive, approach to languages. Contrast the past, when methods were only developed to process well-documented languages, where literacy could be presumed. (This, indeed, was historically a sine qua non for translating materials into a new language.)

So as technology revolutionizes attitudes to foreign languages, and feeds on itself to bootstrap more sophisticated systems, it looks likely to integrate endangered languages into the world community of linguistic systems. 

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