'the linguists'

[Claire Bowern]

Hi Richard,
Thanks for your email. I agree! I still can't quite believe even after 
all these years that I get employed to do this sort of work!
Actually, your story is a good example of why I'm not a fan of Indiana 
Jones fieldwork. In many ways academic linguists have it really easy. We 
get to choose where we work and who to work with, someone pays us to go 
somewhere really neat to hang out with great people to learn really 
fantastically wonderful languages, and then we go back to our 
heated/airconditioned offices and think about it for a while... and if 
it doesn't work out we don't need to go back and we're usually not there 
for all that long so if it's tough it's at least finite, and we can 
usually get out fairly quickly if something goes wrong.
But that won't 'save' a language: in the end the language will continue 
because of the work that you and your colleagues do, and that should get 
more publicity and support. I am uneasy about the rhetoric of the 
academic linguist going in to a community to 'save' a language, when the 
real people who save the language are the people who speak it with their 
kids.
Claire