Documentation of endangered culture and language

The linguistic documentation of sign languages sometimes present a challenge with respect to the question of who to involve in the documentation process. This paper presents a way of meeting this challenge in the linguistic documentation of an endangered sign language. In documenting Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL), a village sign language in Ghana, the research team and the local signers, work together; each group providing their expertise in the data collection and annotation. The linguistic research team provides the linguistic insight and the local signers provide the language data, sociolinguistic information and contribute to data annotation. The whole team works on creating language materials, for example a sign database and resources for teaching, which will be made available online when the project is completed. The paper also discusses the need for language documentation in Adamorobe to preserve the endangered sign language from possible extinction. Education and empowerment of deaf societies are enlisted as means to bridge the gap between deaf and hearing research groups and ultimately protect village sign languages.

What can be downloaded here is the Second edition. The first edition was published in India by the Tura Book Room. Reference: van Breugel, Seino. 2009. Atongmorot balgaba golpho. Tura: Tura Book Room.
Atongmorot Balgaba Golpho is a book of texts in Atong recorded during my fieldwork in India for my PhD. The stories are written in the Roman alphabet, which I adapted to write Atong. The book contains 37 texts on a variety of topics from Atong speakers.

This study presents  a linguistic description of the Bhujel language within the framework of the functional-typological grammar developed mainly by Talmy Givón (2001) and further supplemented by Dixon (2004), Noonan (2003; 2005), Bhat (2004), Haspelmath (2004) and Dryer (2006). Bhujel is a previously undescribed and endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in some limited areas in the eastern part of Tanahun District of Nepal.
This is a field-based study of the form of the Bhujel language spoken mainly in the Andimul village (Anbukhaireni- 1 and Bandipur-8) in Tanahun District. The main goal of the study is to analyze the forms and functions of different grammatical categories of the Bhujel language and compare the structural features of Bhujel revealed by this study to the characteristic structural features of the Tibeto-Burman languages from the typological perspective. This study also examines how the morphosyntactic structure in Bhujel manifests the subtle relationship between linguistic form and linguistic function at both sentence and discourse levels.
The study is organized into thirteen chapters. Chapter 1 mainly reviews the previous descriptive works on the language and sets out the theoretical position underlying the description.  It also outlines the objectives, the significance and the limitations of the study. Chapter 2 mainly examines the sociolinguistic aspects such as the domains of the language use, the attitudes of the speakers towards the language, and the language endangerment. It also discusses the ethnology of the Bhujel.  Chapter 3 analyzes the segmental and supra-segmental features of the language. Chapter 4 presents the acoustic analysis of the sounds of the language. Chapter 5 examines the morphophonological processes in the language. Chapter 6 proposes the Devanagari script for the preliterate Bhujel language. Chapter 7 looks at the inflectional and derivational morphology of the nouns in Bhujel. It also examines the morphology of the pronouns in the language.  Chapter 8 discusses the formation, distribution and functions of the adjectives in the language. Chapter 9 analyzes the categories of the verb such as tense, aspect and modality in the language. It also presents a complex verb agreement system which is based on the hierarchical ranking of the participants (i.e.1→2, 1→3, 2→3) rather than on their semantic or grammatical relations. We argue that Bhujel presents a unique type of the marking on the verb for the direct relations of the participants.  Besides, it shows the neutralization of the 'direct' marker and tense markers in the negative construction. Chapter 10 discusses the adverbs in Bhujel. Chapter 11 looks at the clause structure, noun phrase, order of the elements in the verb complex, major sentences and clause combining processes in the language. Chapter 12 deals with the morphosyntactic devices which are used in the domains of topic continuity, action continuity and thematic continuity at the multi-propositional discourse level in Bhujel. Besides, this chapter discusses such strategies which are employed for different types of discourse functions at the atomic propositional level.  Chapter 13 presents the summary and typological implications of the study.
The annexes mainly comprise 10 analyzed texts, basic vocabulary, and socio-linguistic questionnaire, the respondents of the socio-linguistic questionnaire, Swadesh 100 wordlist of Bhujel dialects, verb inflection paradigms and Bhujel morphemes, their glossing and description in the language.

La synthèse, intitulée "Décrire les langues pour comprendre le Langage", que je présente dans le cadre du diplôme national d'habilitation à diriger des recherches, vise à faire le point sur ma production scientifique actuelle et sur mes projets futurs.
                                                  ***
Dans une première partie introductive, j'évoque brièvement mon parcours de linguiste, qui compte pour le moment trois étapes fondamentales :
- 1. l'étude de l'occitan (commencée à partir du dialecte que l'on parlait dans ma propre famille) puis d'autres langues romanes ;
- 2. la description d'une langue créole, le capverdien (avec laquelle je suis entré en contact dans le cadre de mon Service National) ;
- 3. l'ouverture, lors de mon entrée au C.N.R.S. en 1999, d'un nouveau champ de recherche sur les langues kordofaniennes (parlées au centre de la République du Soudan), dont fait partie le koalib, idiome auquel j'ai consacré environ 12 mois de terrain depuis l'an 2.000.
                                                  ***
Dans une deuxième partie, intitulée la description ou le défi de rendre compte de l'altérité, je passe en revue les principales caractéristiques de mon approche (essentiellement descriptive) du Langage, en commençant par évoquer dans un premier chapitre la façon dont je recueille des données sur le terrain auprès de mes informateurs. J'analyse ensuite (second chapitre) les descriptions que j'ai publiées des idiomes que j'ai étudiés : ces travaux témoignent dans leur ensemble d'une recherche de l'exhaustivité dans le traitement de l'objet considéré et d'un intérêt marqué pour la lexicographie, illustré en particulier par mes deux dictionnaires les plus récents, le Dicionário Prático Português-Caboverdiano, "Dictionnaire pratique portugais-capverdien" (Mendes & al. 2002) et mon Dictionnaire koalib-français (en cours de préparation). Je consacre ensuite un chapitre à la prise en compte de la diachronie, un autre thème récurrent dans mon approche, puis, dans un dernier chapitre, je m'attache à montrer, à l'aide d'exemples tirés de mes divers champs d'étude, l'importance du travail de terrain pour arriver à prendre conscience de certains phénomènes linguistiques.
                                                  ***
La troisième partie, intitulée la relativisation de l'approche, traite des évolutions méthodologiques qui ont accompagné mon cheminement scientifique. Parmi ces évolutions, je mentionne tout d'abord la prise en compte des textes, qui m'a ouvert à la syntaxe. Je mets ensuite l'accent sur la remise en cause de plusieurs concepts de base (langue, dialecte, catégories grammaticales), au fur et à mesure de mes enquêtes de terrain ou de mes études (découverte de la tradition grammaticale arabe). Puis je m'intéresse à la façon dont ont évolué les interférences entre visées descriptives et prescriptives dans mes productions, avant de conclure sur la question du difficile équilibre entre le travail de terrain et un nécessaire entretien des connaissances théoriques du linguiste descripteur.
                                                  ***
La partie suivante, intitulée la diffusion du savoir, traite de l'ensemble de mes activités visant à la transmission des connaissances. Dans un premier chapitre, j'évoque mes expériences d'enseignement (cursus réguliers, cours facultatifs et conférences ponctuelles). Puis, après avoir souligné de façon générale l'intérêt et la valeur scientifiques des ouvrages de vulgarisation, je passe en revue mes principales publications dans ce domaine : articles et synthèses présentant mes recherches à un public de chercheurs, méthodes de langue, traductions et ouvrages lexicaux bilingues. Dans le dernier chapitre de cette partie, j'ai inclus une réflexion sur les relations du linguiste avec les médias, relations qui me semblent cruciales pour l'avenir de la discipline dans les sociétés occidentales contemporaines.
                                                  ***
Dans une cinquième partie, intitulée perspectives, je parle de mes principaux projets de publications et de recherches, en particulier dans le domaine kordofanien (poursuite de la description du koalib, étude d'autres langues heibaniennes) et dans celui des créoles afro-portugais (divers projets pour le capverdien, description de l'annobonais et du saint-antonien). Je mentionne également la vision que j'ai du futur en ce qui concerne mes activités d'encadrement de la recherche (direction de thèses, retour des connaissances acquises vers les communautés linguistiques concernées) et les projets collectifs (opération de recherche, colloques) que j'aimerais voir aboutir.
                                                  ***
En conclusion, je mets l'accent sur l'importance donnée au travail de terrain dans mon approche des langues et du Langage ainsi que sur la nécessité de prendre son temps pour produire des descriptions valables. Je rappelle en dernier lieu que l'étude rigoureuse des langue de communautés minorisées (et souvent brimées) peut aussi être une façon de souligner l'égale dignité des divers groupes humains (grands ou petits) en ce qui concerne le génie du Langage.

Folk song plays a very significant role in the socio-cultural life of Liangmai people. It is a medium to express pleasure and pain, sorrow and joy, spiritual and moral values, and traditional and cultural knowledge. It is a rich form of cultural heritage that contributes towards maintaining the history of the people and plays vital role in connecting generations, establishing cultural identity and helps transmit cultural values, beliefs, knowledge, etc. The notable significant of these folk songs is that people do not learn it through established institution, but by participation. They are narrated from memory and transmitted verbally from one generation to another. Liangmai has very rich repository of folk songs and these songs are referred to as pou-peh lui, meaning ‘grandfather-grandmother song’. Different genre of Liangmai folk songs may be conveniently classified as songs of love and yearning, work songs, recreational and merrymaking songs, village guarding songs, rhymes, children songs and lullabies. The Liangmai community, however, is undergoing a stage of transition due to the influence of modernization thus causing a neglect to the ethos of traditional culture and the oral tradition. Many facets of their culture, like singing of folk songs, are no longer practice by the current generation. Folk songs have been replaced by Christian hymns in most domains in present Liangmai society. As such many Liangmai youths do not realize the importance of their folk songs. However, if the vibrancy of these songs is taught to these young people there are high chances of reviving the once popular folk singing tradition. This paper is an attempt to unearth the beautiful world of folk songs in Liangmai culture and document it. The study explores different genres of Liangmai folk songs and the role it played in building society, acquiring and transmitting knowledge and wisdom. The paper aims to bring back the ‘echo from the mountains’ in the present modern society.

From the introduction:
Approximately 230,000 of the 6.2 million Tibetans in China do not speak Tibetan. Instead, they speak one of about 18 different languages, including languages known as Namuyi, Minyak, Ergong, Khroskyabs, and nDrapa. In total, about 39 languages other than Tibetan are spoken on the Tibetan Plateau, by a little over one million people. These statistics may vary depending on how one defines a language, defines Tibet, or defines the Tibetan people, and, we still have much to learn about the languages of this area. However, regardless of how the numerical details might change, the underlying pattern appears to be well established – Tibet is linguistically diverse. While international scholarly and public attention focuses on the fate of the “Tibetan language”,1 the plight of Tibet’s minority languages continues to go unacknowledged. This article takes a preliminary look at the vitality of Tibet’s 39 minority languages, using UNESCO’s nine-factor model as a framework. While these languages differ vastly, their shared geographical and social environment, as well as their similar and interconnected histories, warrant a discussion of their collective fates. As suggested in the title, the results presented here are preliminary remarks on a complex topic, and should be taken as indicative rather than definitive.

Previous research has shown that the Boro people, also known as the Shinasha, are in the process of shifting from the Borna language to Oromo and Amharic (Lemma and Wedekind 2002). However, the qualitative information gleaned from sociolinguistic interviews had not yet been quantified by the testing of bilingual proficiency. A new survey of the Boro area, completed in 2004, has combined bilingualism testing with a study of social interaction and language attitudes. This paper will present the results of the survey, showing the patterns of language vitality and language endangerment in several different Boro communities. The vitality of Borna across a wider area than expected, combined with the Boro people’s interest in preserving their language, points to the possibility that language shift will be stabilized and eventually reversed.

Dhimal is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in India and Nepal. The variety spoken in India is considered as endangered by Government of India.  In one side it can be seen that the Dhimal speakers are shifting towards Bengali but on the other side, they want to assert their identity as Dhimal.  The paper explores the reasons for the existence of the opposite attitudes in the community.

The main purpose of this survey was to determine whether the Gayil people of southwestern Ethiopia could understand and use literature in Aari, which is related to their speech variety. According to community leaders in that area, the Gayil cannot speak or understand the variety of Aari that has already been developed. This claim was investigated by means of sociolinguistic interviews and a Recorded Text Test (RTT) using literature published in Aari.

This study comes to the conclusion that the Gayil have very little comprehension of existing Aari literature and that the best strategy for providing them with access to written materials is to start a Gayil language development project. Gayil is a vital language, and many of its speakers do not appear to be adequately bilingual in any developed speech variety, including Southern Aari. The linguistic relationship between Gayil and Southern Aari is not close enough for them to use the same body of literature, as shown by the text test results and feedback from both test subjects and interviewees. A literacy campaign in the Gayil area would also appear to be a viable option in spite of the current low literacy rate, as a great deal of interest in literacy was expressed among the Gayil interviewees. For further details and discussion of these results, please refer to the explanations in the study that follows.

The NorthEastern part of India is well-known for its linguistic diversity. Bilingualism and sometimes trilingualism is common both in urban and rural areas. Similarly, in Nagaland, there are 16 recognized Naga tribes, each with their own native tongue and culture. Nagamese, English and sometimes Hindi are used as lingua franca. Nagamese is the most popular among the spoken languages. It has been stated that Nagamese is the fastest growing language in the Naga society today. Besides their own mother tongues, about 80% of the Naga population knows and communicate in Nagamese. It first started as a market language amongst the various tribes and eventually it has come to be accepted by all section of the society. At this rate there are chances of many Naga languages being swallowed up by Nagamese. It posts a great threat to the local tribal languages, especially to minor languages like Liangmai. Liangmai (ISO 639-3) belongs to the Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages family under the Zeme-Naga group (Burling 2003). Liangmai is spoken in Manipur and Nagaland. In Nagaland, Liangmai is clubbed together with Zeme and is collectively recognized as Zeliang tribe. According to the census of India 2001, the total population Zeliang tribe is 36012, of which 2315 are Liangmai. There are five Liangmai villages in Nagaland. The dominant languages spoken in Peren district are Zeme and Nagamese. Being a minority, the Liangmai community is experiencing enormous pressure of language assimilation by surrounding dominant languages. Outside their villages and homes, Liangmais had to switch to either Zeme or Nagamese to communicate with the non-Liangmais. The impact of this shifting may ultimately lead to the extinction of Liangmai speech variety in Nagaland, which could lead to an irreversible loss for the study of Liangmai dialects. The present work discusses about factors responsible for language endangerment with a specific focus on Liangmai community in Nagaland. It examined the nature of endangerment and how it has happened at the linguistic levels. The study examines the use of language in different domains. The aspects like code mixing and code switching and attitudes towards the language are analyzed in the paper.

This article aims at discussing the relation between linguistic research and documentation projects based on a long term field experience among the Kuikuro, a Carib speaking people living in Southern Amazonia (Brazil). Kuikuro is an endangered language, spoken by about 600 individuals, who suffer the encroachment of Brazilian national society, whose dominant language is Portuguese. Whereas the linguistic documentation project started in 2000, with the additional proposal of recording ethnographic contexts of language use, the linguistic research began much earlier. The Kuikuro expectations and representations on research and documentation are described as well as their cultural presuppositions and consequences. Three moments characterize, along almost thirty years, the development of the relations between the researcher(s) and the native people: first, a suspicious reception; then, the domestication of the outsider; finally, the documentation project was assumed by the Kuikuro thems...

This volume contains a critical edition and an English translation of the oldest translation of the Pentateuch into Western Karaim copied in 1720 by Simcha ben Chananel (died 1723). The manuscript was compared with several other Karaim translations of the Torah as well as against the standard text of the Hebrew Bible. To gain a better understanding of its historical, philological, and linguistic background, the author provides an outline of the history of Western Karaim translations of the Hebrew Bible and a description of the manuscript’s language. The entire work is available at https://brill.com/view/title/57179.

As most of the endangered languages only exist in spoken form, it is crucial for linguists to transcribe to preserve records of linguistic events and support language learning. The urgency of language endangerment has also prompted linguists to incorporate computational speech processing tools into the transcription pipeline. However, treating Indigenous knowledge as mere data disenfranchises local language
speakers. In order to truly support oral language speakers in their desire to maintain the language, speech technological solutions need to put human collaboration at the centre of the transcription pipeline.
With the goal of collaboration with language speakers, we explored a transcription pipeline that incorporates respeaking and word-spotting. By including respeaking, a linguistic field method that utilises slow repeated speech, it enables oral language speaker to participate in the transcription process. Using the Indigenous Australian language of Kunwinjku as an example, we showed the positive effect of respeaking on word-spotting. We also demonstrate how additional collaborative tasks in respeaking can be included to improve the performance of word-spotting in the transcription pipeline.

There is an important debate in Anthropology on the objectification of the local culture by the ethnographer, and issues of appropriation, "stealing" and (lack of) reciprocity are particularly significant in post-colonial countries and/or Indigenous contexts.
“Dios mangüy" means "thanks" in Huave language, as the DVD has been conceived to acknowledge the contribution of the host community in the research and to partially restitute some of the data collected (pictures, video, information), in a form that is more "material" and accessible than academic writing.

The DVD is self-produced under a Creative Commons license of CC BY-NC-ND type (Attribution, Non commercial, No derivatives).

DVD CONTENTS:

- VÍDEOS UMBEYAJTS: Eight short thematic clips for use as didactic material for the teaching of the Indigenous language in local primary schools;
- COSTUMBRE Y SABIDURÍAS: A short video by Chiara Bresciani on the preparation of food for festive/ritual events and an 11 mins video by Marta Iannetti on traditional midwifery ("Mi ndxuey ikojts - Nuestras parteras");
- FOTOGRAFÍAS: A slideshow of pictures taken in the village, with background music from local composer Obdulio Muriel;
- LENGUA VIVA: The digital version of some of the drawings and other materials (two rhymes, a tale and a recipe) created by the children of local primary school and collected by anthropologist Laura Montesi;
- A clip with a short introduction to the project and film credits.

CREDITS:

Videos and pictures by Chiara Bresciani and Marta Iannetti

Project coordination and design: Chiara Bresciani (James Cook University, Aarhus University)
Linguistic consultant: Mikko Salminen (James Cook University)
The contents in the DVD chapter "Lengua viva" have been published in: Flores Farán, José Antonio (coord.) 2012 "Pequeña antología del niño Ikojts". Laura Montesi and Obdulio Muriel Diaz, eds. México: INALI)
The authors are most grateful to the people from the community who collaborated to the realization of the videos, in particular to the students of the bilingual primary school Benito Juarez and their teachers for helping with the recording of the language clips, and to the women and midwives who participated in the documentary "Mi ndxuey ikojts - Nuestras parteras".
We also thank Caterina Morbiato, Daniela Vávrová and the ALTAR group at James Cook University for precious support and feedback.

With regard to indigenous Indian tribal languages, we lag far behind in the act of text resource management, knowledge generation, and resource application. We should, therefore, undertake sincere initiative for documenting and digitizing tribal folk texts of indigenous Indian tribal languages to showcase languages, cultures, history, and heritage represented in these folk texts. By adopting some text processing techniques of language technology, we can design useful strategies for documentation and digitization of tribal folk texts. Such activities can give the tribal folk texts and the tribal communities, from where these folk text samples are collected, a new lease of life for survival, sustenance, and growth.

The Abankaleke dialect cluster of the Igbo language has been a subject of controversy among scholars. Prominent among the issues is the peculiar nature of the tonal patterning. This work therefore investigates the tonal structure of the two most popular and controversial of the dialects: Izii and Ezaa at the lexical level using the autosegmental phonology framework. An adapted form of Ibadan wordlist of 400 Basic Items (Trial) English version (a total of 150 items were randomly selected from the list) was used. Structured personal interview was used and the data were gathered from three adult speakers from each of the dialects using the Phonology Assistant version 2.2 (1995-2005) software packages developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International to record and transcribe the data. In the results, high, low, downstepped high and the high raising tones were identified in the two dialects while Ezaa dialect featured in addition, the falling and the rising glides. Some tonal processes of insertion, deletion, delinking, docking and relinking were observed. However, the upstep tone which is the major suspect for the peculiar tonal patterning of the Abankeleke dialects is not observed. We therefore suspect that it may well be a grammatical tone and may occur in other units higher than the word in these dialects.