Linguistics researchers reintroduce indigenous communities to ancestral languages, cultures (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Linguistics researchers reintroduce indigenous communities to ancestral
languages, cultures

The University of Chicago Chronicle
November 3, 2005 - Vol. 25 No. 4

By Jennifer Carnig
News Office
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/051103/linguistics.shtml

For many Americans, it is hard to grasp why language matters. It is a
point of view that John Goldsmith, the Edward Carson Waller
Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics, said he is constantly
combating.

“I think it’s something difficult for people to understand, unless their
language is threatened,” Goldsmith said. “But if you even go somewhere
as close as Quebec, you get it instantly. Language matters Ð it is your
culture and your history.”

With about half of the world’s currently used human languages heading
toward extinction, according to the National Endowment for the
Humanities, this is a critical historical moment in the preservation of
both language and culture. With that in mind, Goldsmith and a team of
University faculty and staff, including John Lucy, the William Benton
Professor in Comparative Human Development, are leading a project in
the hopes of preserving and saving several North, Central and South
American Indian languages. Some of the languages the project seeks to
preserve include the Algonquian languages Meskwaki and Cree,
Greenlandic Eskimo and Inuktitut.

The team behind the project, “Digital Preservation of Mesoamerican
Linguistic Archives,” has been awarded a grant by the NEH and the
National Science Foundation as part of a new effort partnering the
organizations to save endangered languages.

The project allows the Language Laboratories and Archives, an
organization within the Humanities Division that supports language
study and linguistic research, to digitize its unique recordings of
world languages. In doing so, these resources will become publicly
available for the first time to an international community of scholars
and students via the Web.

The materials include audio field and studio recordings that faculty and
students in Linguistics and Anthropology have collected. The LLA staff
members are making digital masters of recordings currently at risk and
unavailable for public consumption.

Based on prior audio preservation experience, Goldsmith said that over
the two-year period of the grant, he expects the project will make
accessible about 850 hours of audio recordings.

“We’re doing some serious first aid with this project, and we’re just in
time,” Goldsmith said. “Many of these languages are not going to be
around in 50 years, so if we don’t preserve these recordings, they
could simply be gone.”

The project, which started July 1, is reflective of a trend moving
through the field of linguistics as a whole, Goldsmith said. In moving
the audio recordings to the Web, they will now be available to
indigenous communities, in some cases for the first time.

“It used to be that your constituency was your academic community,” he
said, explaining that when many of these recordings were first made, as
long as 100 years ago in some instances, it was the norm that the
information became the property of the researcher, university or
college. “Now we can see more clearly the ethical implications of those
actions, and so your constituency is as much the indigenous community as
it is the academic community.”

By posting the languages online, researchers are reintroducing
“important cultural artifacts” to communities, such as discussions of
everyday life, legends and even some music. Some of the stories may
have been lost to the native community, or they may have changed their
form. Making them available will allow comparison with current cultural
artifacts, Goldsmith said.

The project also reflects another trend in linguistics. Formerly part of
anthropology, the field of linguistics broke off on its own in the
1920s. Here at the University, the Department of Linguistics was
established in 1928. At that time, most research was conducted on
documenting North American languages. With the Chomskian revolution,
however, the mental aspects of language dominated the study of
linguistics between the 1960s and the 1990s. Only now has there been
resurgence in the field of documentation.

Alan Yu, Assistant Professor in Linguistics, is working on his own
language documentation project for the Washo community, Native
Americans living in California and Nevada around Lake Tahoe. Of the
1,000 to 2,000 Washo tribe members alive today, only about 13 people,
all in their 60s, speak the language fluently. Yu, who is still in the
beginning stages of applying for funding, hopes to first document the
language and then help create a pedagogical program so others in the
community can learn it.

“This is why documentation projects are so important,” Yu said. “You
can’t teach a language until you know what you’re teaching.”

Yu has been making a few one- or two-week-long trips a year to Lake
Tahoe for the past couple of years to begin taping. So far, he has
collected creation stories, descriptions of food preparation and tales
of rituals and interactions with neighboring tribes. To get that sort
of access, he first had to promise that he would not own or profit from
any of the recordings. Another linguist previously made 50 years of
recordings, but now will not share the tapes with the tribe.

“There is a new surge of cooperation between communities and linguists,
and we have to be very careful with that if we want to avoid the
distrust that existed for so long,” Yu said. “What you can learn
scientifically from languages is so important, but there is more at
stake than that. Because you’re not just learning a language, you’re
learning a culture and a way of life, one that in many cases is no
longer in existence.”