Archive for the 'linguistics' Category

06
Jul

Thesis: Change of game plan

By Bill Journee 0 Comments
Categories: honours and linguistics

I haven’t updated my blog for a while partially because I’ve been very busy (if you’re here via Twitter, you’ll probably be laughing about now) and because I’ve actually not had much to say about my thesis. After having a quiet nervous breakdown about the quality of the data as I hinted in the last blog post, I got down to the business of trying to work with the data I had.

By and large, the quality of the photocopies themselves is fine, and I can get most if not all the typed and written notes on the page. Or at least, I can see the letters and diacritics and such to a level that means I can type the stuff out. The problem now is that since the records I’m working with in those sets of data are so old, they predate the standardization of Yanyuwa spelling and orthography. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were translations I could work with, but since I don’t speak the language I’m working on, I can’t read the stuff out to get a better sense of what’s being written, and nothing in the data matches the dictionary. In short, even though most of the data isn’t actually destroyed beyond recognition, it’s of very little interest without having a very good understanding of the language to be able to interpret just what is being done in the data.

Enter my new plan: As I’ve mentioned earlier, I intended to work with data spanning from the very beginning of study in Yanyuwa in the 60s, through to most recent data available. Since the data from the 60s through to the mid-80s is effectively useless to me, at least for the moment, I’m moving onto working with the newer data which is in the standard orthography.

At the moment, I’m working on the basis that this will be my only real source of data. Instead of looking at the data over time as was originally intended, this means that I’ll be looking at the data and comparing it to the complexity of kinship terminology found in the dictionary compiled based on all the extant data on the language. Although this is not ideal, it is a much more realistic goal than trying to learn the whole language to begin to understand the data in the early material. Either that or I have to ask John Bradley to translate large amounts of data for me, which isn’t fair on him and isn’t really moving my own research skills further in the process. If I continue working with Yanyuwa at some point in the future then as a matter of urgency I would endevour to have all of this data preserved in a standardised form, although this would involve a large amount of time and effort to do.

Until then, I’ll keep plugging away with what I’ve got.

09
Jun

First Hurdle: Data Archiving

By Bill Journee 3 Comments
Categories: honours and linguistics

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):

scans

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.

08
Jun

Book Review: Nicholas Evans – Dying Words

By Bill Journee 1 Comment
Categories: linguistics and review

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.

dyingwords

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.

10
May

Endangered languages – a very brief introduction

By Bill Journee 1 Comment
Categories: linguistics

Ok, welcome to my first linguistics-related post for a little while now – @ParisianChic (AKA Eunice Moore) asked on Twitter:

@mr_billiam How does one stop an endangered language like Yanyuwa from becoming extinct? What made u become interested in this particularly?

SInce 140 characters is never going to be enough to answer either of those questions sufficiently I decided that this was a good point to stop and look at a few of the things driving me this year on my little endangered languages trek with Yanyuwa, even though it hasn’t properly begun yet.

Endangered languages

Prominent linguist Michael Krauss and a number of other linguists predicted, rather ominously, in 1992 that in this century over 90% of the world’s approximately 7000 languages could become extinct1. This obviously means that in 100 years time – in an extreme case – only 700 languages out of the current 7000 could still be with us in less than 100 years.

What it also means is that a huge amount of collective knowledge – cultural knowledge, human knowledge – and a huge number of communities are going to be destroyed in the process. At the moment, over 80% of the people in the world speak one of the 83 biggest languages, whereas just 0.2% of people in the world speak 3,586 of the smallest languages2. That difference means that most of the smallest languages in the world are sustained only by a few speakers – usually elderly speakers – and once they are gone, nobody will speak the language any more.

These languages often contain within them ideas and thought structures dating back millenia, and many of the languages are also scarcely if at all documented. Languages such as Yanyuwa who have only a few (7, as of this moment) speakers left don’t have the huge amount of text, recordings and grammatical information available to comprehensively understand what made the language tick once it is gone. This is where linguists come in.

What to do about endangered languages?

From what I’ve said above, it should be fairly clear that most of the languages – especially those most endangered – are on a downward slope that can’t really be reversed. When a language, such as Yanyuwa, has only a few speakers left, it is beyond the point at which a realistic language revitalization program can take place. Some languages, in less serious states of endangerment, can be restored as a first and growing language through the active involvement of speakers and community members. A good example of this is the Hawaiian language3, which has historically been severely endangered but is now becoming spoken by more and more people, is a language which can now be used as a sole language for education from prep through to postgraduate university if wanted.

Hawaiian the exception to the rule, though. Ultimately, most languages – especially those which are severely endangered, will not have the same number of speakers, the same amount of support or the facilities to stage a comeback and will eventually no longer be spoken. Most linguistic work on endangered languages now focuses on the documentation of these endangered languages before they cease to be spoken without any record for future generations.

Australia, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific regions pose specific problems for linguists and governments tackling language endangerment. These are all areas of extremely high linguistic diversity – and also areas of extremely high language endangerment4. Australia, for example, has about 230 languages spoken, but many of them like Yanyuwa have less than 10 elderly speakers left, and many are only beginning to be documented. The case in South East Asia – areas of extremely high language density such as Papua New Guinea with about 820 languages – is even worse, with many languages not documented at all, or even known to science. 820 is an estimate, but we don’t know for sure.

So, obviously, there is no clear answer to the question of what can be done to stop languages from becoming extinct. It will be one of the great cultural questions to be addressed by mankind in the next 100 years, as more and more languages become extinct.

Why am I here?

I think it’s probably obvious from what I’ve said above that I’m very interested and concerned by the plight of languages around the world. It is a tragedy that languages and the cultures, communities and all the other things they entail are being lost at an alarming rate. While nothing can be done to stop the loss, per se, I think it’s important to do what can be done to try and record as much of these languages as possible and assist speakers and community members in any way possible to that end.

I’ll write more about endangered languages as the year goes on, and admittedly my thesis topic doesn’t directly address these issues – I’m analysing existing language data from Yanyuwa in the context of its endangerment – but I thought I’d do a very broad overview of what language endangerment is all about. To me, anyway.

  1. Hale, K., Krauss, L., Watahomigie, L., Yamamoto, C., Craig, L., Nasayesva, J., et al. (1992). Endangered Languages. Language , 1 (68), 1-43. [↩]
  2. Harrison, K. (2007). When Languages Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 14. [↩]
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language [↩]
  4. Harrison, K. (2007). When Languages Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 13-14. [↩]