Rosetta Stone

[William J Poser]

In principle I agree that it is desirable to train members of endangered
language communities to do documentation and develop teaching materials.
However, it is important to note that the relatively large groups with large
numbers of speakers, are not a good model for the much smaller groups that
are more typical at least in much of North America. Here in British Columbia,
for example, with the exception of a few larger groups that spill over
into BC, such as the Plains Cree, no indigenous language has more than
1,500 speakers and most have far fewer. Furthermore, dialects often
differ considerably from community to community, and the people regard it
as important to document and teach their particular dialect. In the case
of the language that I mostly work with, Carrier, there are perhaps 1,000
total speakers, but they are very unevenly distributed. There are a couple
of dialects that have perhaps 300 speakers each, and then a bunch of
communities that have from a few dozen on down to four fluent speakers
and a few semi-speakers. Not only are the speaker numbers small,
so are the total populations. The Carrier band that has four fluent
speakers left has a total membership of 266 people.

It is also typical of language in BC that there are few if any young
speakers, which means that the work must be done quickly if it is to be
done at all.

The upshot of this is that the people with the specialized skills
to do the documentation and develop teaching materials are likely
not to be available, and even if people with the right talents and
motivation can be found, waiting for them to acquire the necessary
training is undesirable. A further factor is that people with these
talents will also likely be talented in other ways and may,
out of community need, opportunity, or personal preference, spend
their time doing something else. Granting that some tasks can be done by
people without a lot of specialized training, you simply aren't going
to get a good grammar, dictionary, or textbook from people without
both a relatively rare set of talents and a considerable amount
of training and experience. It is true that some people may acquire
the necessary skills without formal education in linguistics and
related fields, but even so, they are people with unusual talents and
interests who have educated themselves over a considerable time.

Given the relative rarity of people with these skills, the odds of
finding even one such person in a group of a few hundred or even a
few thousand people are poor. We can make a crude estimate on the
basis of the Navajo Nation. Out of approximately 200,000 people,
I would estimate that there are no more than 20 who have done
serious work on documentation or the development of teaching materials.
I won't list everyone I am thinking of so as not to insult anybody
or trigger arguments about individuals, but I am including 
people with advanced degrees in linguistics like Elavina Tsosie Perkins
and Mary Anne Willie, people like William Morgan, the co-author of
the Navajo dictionary, and people more focussed on development of
teaching materials, such as Irene Silentman. This yields a crude
estimate of about one person in ten thousand. Even if this estimate
is off by an order of magnitude, it means that in communities of the
size typical in BC the odds of finding a good linguist/materials developer
in the community are poor. Such smaller communities are likely to have
to make use of people from outside the community.

Bill