Dear friends of ELA,

First of all, allow us to wish all of you the Happiest of Gregorian (not to mention Julian) New Years! We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your continued support as well as to give all of you a very brief summary of what we have accomplished this 2010 and where we hope to go in 2011.

The first major landmarks for us in 2010 were our official incorporation as a 501c3 non-profit organization and the New York Times article which highlighted our work. While the former allowed us to take our operation to a new level, the latter brought our work to the public eye and showed us just how many people there are out there with a similar passion for maintaining and understanding linguistic diversity. Although we only had a very short time to organize our general meetings over the summer, we felt they were successful in bringing together a fantastic range of people interested in our mission. It was the first step in forming a real grassroots initiative to address language endangerment in New York City.

We hope to make our language survey a regular summer activity and look forward to taking to the streets again with all of you this summer. With more time for us to consider the complex logistics, I’m sure this year’s program will be even more fruitful than the last.

In terms of organization, it must be said that we are learning as we go. One of our foremost new year’s resolutions is to improve the line of communication between us and all those interested in participating in our projects so we can be more efficient in placing volunteers. Sincerest apologies to all of you whom we have not been able to respond to as quickly as we wanted to. On a positive note – inefficiencies notwithstanding – we were able to initiate many new projects thanks to the enthusiasm of our new volunteers. As it now stands, we have regular meetings for the following language groups: Amuzgo, Mahongwe/Kota, Mamuju, Garifuna, Neo-Aramaic, Kabardian and Ossetian. We also hope to soon begin a new group for Shughni/Roshani this month or next. Some of these groups are focused on grammatical description while others are aimed at the creation of pedagogical materials. You are all invited to participate in these weekly sessions. Just contact Bien at coordinator[at]endangeredlanguagealliance.org for the schedule and more information.

2010 also brought us good luck in the form of grant support for several in-situ projects. Baitz Niahossa will carry out work on Tsou in Taiwan with support from the Alice Cozzi Heritage Language Foundation, and Natalia Bermudez has recently left for Panama, where, with the support of the Gesellscahft für Bedrohte Sprache, she will begin fieldwork on Naso (aka Teribe), an endangered Chibchan language.

Finally, some upcoming events:

The CUNY Conference on the Phonology of Endangered Languages will take place January 12 – 14, 2011 at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. The goal of the conference is to learn whatever we can from the sound patterns of languages that are endangered or threatened, with a special emphasis on understudied languages. For more information, see:http://cunyphonologyforum.net/endan.php

Daniel Kaufman will be holding a weekly workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center which is free and open to all. It will cover language documentation and description and will meet Thursdays 5:00-7:00 pm. Please email info[at]endangeredlanguagealliance.org for more details.

Best wishes to all of you for 2011…onwards and upwards!

ELA Co-Directors Daniel Kaufman, Juliette Blevins & Bob Holman

Date and Time: Monday, October 4th, 2010, 6:30-8:30pm – CUNY Graduate Center on 365 Fifth Avenue between 34th and 35th street, Room 9207

Archiving for the future, today: the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS

David Nathan

ELAR, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Language documentations and the archives that hold them are valuable sources of linguistic research data. In the future, these archives will also become crucial vectors of transmission for many endangered and extinct languages. Thus the theory and practice of documentation and the capabilities of archives will play key roles in the futures of many human languages. Today, documentary linguistics needs an evaluative and critical discourse about its practices and outcomes. Researchers have been struggling to go beyond conceiving of documentations as collections of data files. One route forward is through consideration of documentation’s audiences and usages, to reach better understandings of the forms of documentation and what it means to publish them.

Just as documentary linguistics has found an ethical and community-oriented footing (Austin 2010), archives must also function as ethical publishers of this component of human heritage. The ELAR archive at SOAS has taken a social networking approach in order to address two major characteristics of endangered languages documentation: the sensitivity of many such materials (Thieberger & Musgrave 2007), requiring effective but nuanced access control; and the fluidity of the materials and their access conditions over time, requiring multiple ongoing relationships between depositors, users, and the archive (Nathan, in press). Tomorrow’s digital language archiving is not about technology but about relationships. Management of non-preservation functions is largely handed over to depositors and users, and the archive becomes redefined as a forum for building and conducting relationships and exchanges among them.

In this talk, I will outline and demonstrate ELAR’s approach to these issues.

References 

Austin, Peter K. 2010. Current Issues in Language Documentation. In Peter K. Austin (ed.) Language Documentation and Description, Volume 7:12-33. London: SOAS.

David Nathan (in press) Archives 2.0 for Endangered Languages: from Disk Space to MySpace. In International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. Edinburgh University Press. 2010.

Thieberger, Nicholas & Simon Musgrave. 2007. Documentary linguistics and ethical issues. In Peter K. Austin (ed) Language Documentation and Description, Volume 4. 26-37.

The second town meeting of the ELA was held successfully last Saturday at the Bowery Poetry Club. The transactions are briefly summarized here for those who were unable to make it. We discussed the broader goals of the language survey portion of our summer project and several groups spoke about their experiences searching out languages in different neighborhoods. As noted by myself and others, finding uncommon and endangered languages in this town is far easier than one might think. On a casual stroll through Jackson Heights, one group found speakers of Tlapaneco, Mazatec, Nahua as well as leads for Amuzgo speakers. Another group, in a brief foray into Coney Island, found speakers of Mingrelian, Svan and other languages of Georgia. A third group made good progress among the Malian and Senegalese communities around 116th street by going straight to the community centers. I am hoping that all groups can keep a log of their activities and areas canvased. The first step in keeping an activity log is for all groups to set-up Google groups, as many already have done.

After some general strategizing we moved on to our plans for the second part of the project, in which we will be working with selected speakers to record their language. The survey is slated to continue into the summer but volunteers will soon be able to set up their own recording sessions. We will begin gently, by first recording Swadesh lists and other vocabulary items and only then slowly moving on to more complex tasks. Swadesh lists in various languages, as well as new multi-lingual flyers and other materials distributed in this meeting, are available here. When people get weary of recording words, we will move on to recording phrases and basic greetings. By mid-August I am hoping we can begin recording longer texts.

We have some volunteers who will be helping out with the technicalities of recording. For those who are interested in learning how to make good recordings and practicing with the new digital recorders, there is a session tentatively being set up for next week, June 29th with Nina. More info to follow soon.

As many of you know, my guidance, for what it’s worth, will have to be administered long-distance for the next several weeks as I already had immutable plans to be in Indonesia and the Philippines before this summer project materialized. But fear not, I am anticipating having regular access to email for most of the trip and will do my best to respond to all questions and issues as they arise. Juliette will be in charge of the office and will be answering the office phone so there should be no disruptions in service, as they say.