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First Hurdle: Data Archiving

Well, here I am, literally one day into my work on my thesis and I’ve hit my first hurdle: The data.

On the positive side of the equation, I don’t have to jump through the hoops of ethics clearance to get access to my data: It’s all been collected and is sitting in a locker waiting for me to use it.

The negative side comes in two parts, the short version and the long version. The short version: Some of it is unreadable.

The long version I’ll leave you to figure out yourselves from this photo I took (I’ll replace it with a scan to better illustrate the problem when I have a scan):

As you can (probably) see, the page is a photocopy of a page of written text – which in itself isn’t great but it’s not the end of the world – what is definitely a problem is the fact that there should be a good deal more text on that page than is actually visible. Back behind the blurry smeared faded areas used to be what I can only assume was legible text, and therefore some of the original data for a language which is very quickly falling out of use is also fading from its written records.

This isn’t (by any means) the condition of the vast majority of the data I have at my disposal – only the earliest data is kept in solely written form, the following data in much better condition and easily decipherable in the form available to me. All the original materials are kept at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies), who keep a fairly comprehensive archive of language and other cultural material to save it for later use. I must admit that, given the state of the photocopies taken a number of years ago, I seriously doubt the legibility of the original documents also which have had several more years to deteriorate. For me, this is a hurdle which will relatively easily be overcome – since I’m working on an honours thesis, I can exclude a large amount of the data which is illegible because I need to exclude a lot of data in any case.

The broader issue raised, I think, is about how data is stored, archived, and duplicated. All of the data I’ll be using for my honours thesis is in paper-form, with very little available in the way of digital records on the language. This is a relic of the time in which most of the data was collected, and for that reason isn’t something that could be easily helped.

Given that these records are some of the few true records of a moribund language remaining, however, it seems that preserving such records from loss purely because of the deterioration of the original written records would be a tragedy for anybody wanting to look at the language in any additonal detail and for the Yanyuwa people who may want to work with their language in the future.

I’m not at all saying that anybody has been negligent or lazy or anything else regarding this language data – for all I know, the original transcript pages are kept digitally as images in much better shape than I have access to them in – it’s more a general observation about what could happen and the value that should be placed on these vitally important cultural records before it’s too late.

Book Review: Nicholas Evans – Dying Words

A bit of a departure from my normal blog format for a book review here, but since I’m in on this one early I thought I’d give it a shot. (That and a few people on Twitter wanted to know what I thought when I was done!)

Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us is a book about the supremely human creation of language, in all its forms and intricacies. It isn’t a book that stands back and proclaims the imminent death of languages, but rather looks down into the crevices of language and what it means to us, to societies, and to communities whose languages are hanging by a rapidly fraying thread. It also serves to describe (although only scratch the surface of) the diversity of thought, meaning and culture embedded within languages not as a eulogy to something passing but as a living, breathing entity.

A word about the author: Dying Words is written by Nicholas Evans, one of the preeminent linguists in Australian linguistics, and perhaps one of the most established living researchers of Australian languages and a great spokesperson for the cause of language endangerment around the globe. He also happens to be the head of the Department of Linguistics at the Australian National University. His commitment and sincere interest in the plight of endangered languages is perhaps seen most obviously in the cover of the book, Sweers Island 2008 by the Bentnick Island Artists – painted in 2008 by collectively by every remaining speaker of the Kayardild language, a language and community with which he has worked for well over 20 years, and whose population is now below 10.

The book is broken into five main thematic sections, each broken further into chapters:

The Library of Babel which draws on the image of a language library to describe numerically the diversity of languages of the world, and how the world has changed in the last several hundred years both in aid of and to the determent of language diversity.

A Great Feast of Languages looks at the ways in which languages differ – sounds, grammar and meaning, then looking at the social level of language; kinship, social relations and “[how] speakers keep track of their social universe” (47)

Faint Tracks in an Ancient Wordscape: Languages and Deep World History looks, as it suggests, looks into the history of language and what ancient languages have to tell us about language today, and describes some of the techniques employed by linguists in reconstructing long silent languages.

Ratchetting Each Other Up: The Coevolution of Language, Culture and Thought an amazing section on the relationship of language and thought, boiling one of the most complex ideas in linguistics down to a fascinating and enlightening look at “Trellises of the Mind” and a revealing look at the way art, language and the mind intersect.

Listening While We Can the final section of the book looks at what can and is being done to protect and revive endangered languages as well as looking at some of the complexities of field research of endangered languages.

Dying Words is a linguistics book for everyone, accessible yet deep, informative, and most of all is a good read. It sets out the variety and amazing insights on offer from the world’s endangered languages in a way which teaches you a lot about the languages, their speakers, and why the need to save such languages is becoming more pressing with each passing day – and you probably won’t notice, but you’ll be learning quite a lot of linguistic theory along the way!

Evans can take you away in the most complex linguistic theorem, and bring you back feeling like you went on a journey that wasn’t difficult as much as it was enchanting, and it’s through these encounters that the most interesting insights from languages around the world are found in this book. There is the expectation that you at least have some basic understanding of the workings of language – know what a noun, verb, or adjective is for example – but beyond that everything is spelled out pretty clearly. His experience with a critically endangered Australian language – Kayardild – shines through and his insights into the social and linguistic workings of the society lend great insight into his observations not only about the Kayardild people but of the plight of those experiencing language loss around the world.

This book is about the full gamut of what we lose when languages die, about why it matters, and about what questions and techniques best shape our response to this looming collapse of human ways of knowing…[B]ecause we can only meet this challenge through a concerted effort by linguists, the communities themselves, and the lay public, I have tried to writ this book in a way that speaks to all these types of reader.
Dying Words: xviii-xix.

Dying Words is not intended to be a linguistic reference manual, nor is it intended to be a guide to language endangerment (of which there are already many.) It is a book which is first and foremost a book to be read, and one which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It is a reference book with a thread of story weaved through, bringing with it a sense of the enormity of language and what it means to mankind. If you have an interest in language, or are curious about what’s out there outside the languages you’re familiar with, I strongly recommend this book.

The book is published by Wiley and available now through them and a number of online bookstores such as Amazon.