AN native speaker scholars

[Paul Lassettre]

Greetings,

Miriam Meyerhoff, who is not on the list, has asked me to forward the
following message. Any replies should probably go directly to her,
"mhoff at hawaii.edu", although I will gladly forward replies that come to
me or appear on the list.

Paul L.


[begin forwarded message]

Dear AN-LANG list,

Paul Lassettre, who co-organized AFLA V at the University of Hawai'i
with me in 1998, forwarded me the recent thread on AN-LANG regarding
the paucity of native (AN language) speakers involved in AFLA
conferences in particular (and AN language conferences in general).
	I am grateful to William Davies for correcting the facts on
AFLA, but would like to elaborate briefly.
	For the record, since its inception, key members of AFLA have
made extraordinary efforts to make the conference as inclusive as
possible. In 1997, we were fortunate enough to enlist the support of
Paul Chapin (from the National Science Foundation in the US, who many
people on this list will know both as an indefatiguable supporter of
linguistics in general and AN languages in his own work). With Dr
Chapin's help, I was able to obtain a travel grant which paid for
three keynote speakers (Roger-Bruno Rabenilaina and Cecile
Manorohanta from Madagascar, and Charles Randriamasimanina from New
Zealand) to attend the conference.
	In applying for the grant, I was following the lead of some
of the foundation members of AFLA, particularly Ed Keenan, some of
whom have fostered professional ties and collaborations with
AN-speaking linguists over a number of years. Many of these people,
and they include graduate students, are extremely sensitive to the
professional linguist's all too common experience of being in a
position of "taking" from native speakers with little return in kind.
These individuals have, therefore, elected to commit and donate a
good deal of personal time and resources to the task of giving
something back in return. The collaborative research and translations
undertaken by, e.g. Keenan, Ileana Paul, and Lisa Travis, have
resulted in some of the work being conducted by native speakers of
these languages reaching a far wider audience than it might have done
otherwise.
	This year's AFLA being organized by Marian Klamer has also
built into its budget travel costs for an established and up and
coming linguist who are native speakers of Indonesian languages,
continuing this sort of commitment.
	I feel, therefore, that it is not only inaccurate to
characterize AFLA as not being concerned with encouraging and
fostering the involvement of native AN-language speaking linguists,
as Professor Naylor has, but it is unfair (though perhaps just
ill-informed) to characterize those who have been most intimately
involved with AFLA as being actively antipathetical to the goal of
including such linguists, as Professor Myhill has done.
	AFLA, like the rest of linguistics, faces problems of
representation and inclusion that in general characterize the whole
academy. The academy continues to be overwhelmingly white, and mainly
male (disproportionately so as one moves up the ladder). Individuals
involved in AFLA, however, have put their money and time where their
mouth is, and to suggest that they have not done so out of
professional spite or insecurity or simple indolence, is to do these
people an injustice.


Miriam Meyerhoff
Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
1890 East-West Rd
Honolulu, HI 96822

808 956-3236 (ph)
808 956-9166 (fax)

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~mhoff/