Roger Blench: Endangered
languages documentation
I
have been working on the recording and documentation of endangered languages
and cultures since the 1980s, at first principally in
This
page provides links to regional pages, which in turn provide links to various
parts of my website where various types of documentation lurk. Field data tends
to be in pdf format. I am in principle willing to provide original Unicode
files to serious enquirers.
My
current research projects focus on two areas, Central Nigeria and
Endangerment
comes in many forms and affects many areas of communication. Apart from the
broad class of language the following areas of endangerment also deserve
attention.
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Comment |
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Especially in |
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Phonologies |
Some
languages have very unusual and complex phonologies, including exotic sounds.
These are often being simplified as speakers come into contact with dominant
lingua francas. Even where a language is not threatened, its more remarkable
features may be in danger of disappearing. |
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Languages
may be thriving but their specialised lexicon, for examples for plants and
animals may be lost, due to environmental change. Education is the single most
important cause of lexical erosion. For this reason many of my pages include
specialised lists of plant and animal names. |
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Sign
languages |
Sign
languages usually arise from a high incidence of congenital deafness, and
from an ethical perspective, we should be glad if they are disappearing.
However, they are remarkable systems and well worth documenting. I have
recorded the existence of two previously unknown sign languages, in Mali and among the Bura
in |
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Languages
can survive where oral literature and music, the bearers of the richest form
of the language disappear. World religions are important engines of this type
of cultural loss, together with uncaring governments and ill-thought out
educational systems |
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Material
culture is deeply unfashionable among anthropologists and its documentation
no longer a priority. However, the construction and use of objects has its
own elaborate lexical fields and these are in danger of being forgotten as
Euro-American consumer goods triumph. The visual material accompanying the
web pages provides some initial documentation for individual languages |
Most
languages spoken by foragers are endangered by their nature and I have also set
up a separate page to point to any
work I have done in this area.
The
growth of the endangered languages industry and the almost inversely
proportional rate at which languages are being lost does suggest itself for a
short satire involving small cars and orange juice.
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In recent years, the synthetic
panic surrounding endangered languages has led to the development of an
intriguing split. Out in the real world, there are a large number of
genuinely endangered languages, many of which are moribund. Spoken only by a
small number of old people, often with few teeth and wayward enunciation,
recovering their language is often difficult. These languages are not going
to be revived, so the benefit of recording them can be seen as antiquarian;
their value is to teach us something about the history and culture of the
planet. At the next level up are very small languages; some of these are
lively, simply by being spoken in very remote communities, while others are
disappearing fast as the speakers assimilate to a prestige language. Although
it is conceivable that this process could be reversed, it rarely is, because
the benefits for outsiders of putting a great deal of energy into such a
transformation are slight. |
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These endangered languages
can be contrasted with the ‘endangered’ languages whose study is supported by
institutions, foundations and the like, worried over in seminars by
furrowed-brow academics, analysed in expensive books from venerable
university presses and talked about during the course of spectacularly
ill-informed radio programmes. Most of these languages may only be endangered
in an extremely elastic sense of the word, but they do have qualities that
endear them to institutions; convenient location and relatively large number
of speakers, with some who speak an international language. It is easy to see
why this is so. Since universities and other foundations became institutions
whose main goal is their own propagation, they are increasingly run by hungry
bureaucrats whose goal is the increase in their numbers and the consolidation
of their salaries. As a consequence, some of the academics appointed to be
responsible for endangered language programmes look like idiosyncratic
choices to outsiders; individuals with no significant linguistics
publications and no discernible interest in endangered languages. But of
course they are ideal for administrators; they accept the need for slick
websites, glossy brochures and their lack of experience with the reality of
endangered languages means almost anything goes, in terms of expensive and useless
activities. |
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The object is thus to
acquire research that is relatively cheap but which attracts high levels of
overheads. The rise in concern for endangered languages has thus come as something
of a boon in a period of financial regression; it plays on a certain
sentimentalism with the general public while having no threatening content.
Outsiders can be manipulated into imagining that indeed the threatened
languages out there are being documented and returned from the edge. One
consequence of this has been a surge of interest by those in the art world;
requests come in for recordings or lines of poetry in endangered languages,
to be used in installations or even to be projected on the sides of
buildings. The proposed function of this is ‘draw attention’ to the loss of
languages. But this is rather like watching a cookery programme extolling the
virtues of fresh food while eating a t.v. dinner. No amount of agonising by
the middle classes has any real impact on language loss, only on the amount
and quality of the hand-wringing. |
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One of the more surreal
developments in the world of language documentation is the rising power of
‘Ethics’ committees. These are no more about ethics than Animal Farm is about
practical porcine husbandry; they exist to prevent universities from being
embroiled in legal cases. One of the particularly bizarre demands that has
surfaced recently is that students who go to the field must anonymise their
data (thereby cutting out community involvement at a step) and, even more
strangely, must destroy their data after completion of their project. These
strictures apply even to speakers of the actual language to be documented,
who then of course must lie on their applications if they wish to be funded.
No wonder professorships in language documentation go preferentially to those
who tell good jokes about over-studied languages. |
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Linguists therefore wish to
perform a sort of surgery on the patient, extracting the maximum of ephemeral
career points with the minimum of pain to themselves. This type of
linguistics is of very limited value to the study of language, since most of
it involves a type of intricate self-absorption, philosophy masquerading as
empirical science. But for linguists this is not generally a matter of
concern; like everyone else, they want a career path and they need to keep
feeding the insatiable demand for institutional overheads. This has become
rather clear as ‘Endangered Languages’ now seems to be on a downwards arc,
and those who have used it to embed themselves in academia are now leaving
the sinking ship to reproduce mainstream linguistics for the remainder of
their careers. |
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So the main reason for the choices concerning
endangered languages appears to be convenience; for something smart to say in
the seminar room, and future employability in the much larger world of
academia. Moreover, as in other sectors, such as NGOs or international
development, the administrators quickly discover that colour leaflets and
websites trumpeting successes are so much cheaper and more satisfying than
real achievement. Hence the expenditure of such large sums for such limited
results; the old men and women go to their graves largely unrecorded and the
archives will fill with largely unread theses framed by forgotten theories. |