[lg policy] Linguist Saves Culture, Traditions by Documenting Languages

Wed Aug 19 14:03:59 UTC 2009

-- Linguist Saves Culture, Traditions by Documenting Languages
 By Nancy Kolsti

While growing up in south India, Shobhana Chelliah knew very little
about the state of Manipur, located thousands of miles away on India's
northeastern border with Myanmar. As a native speaker of Tamil, one of
India's official languages, she also wasn't familiar with the
languages of Manipur. But today, Chelliah - now an associate professor
of linguistics and technical communication at the University of North
Texas - has studied not only Manipur's major language, Meithei, but
also one of its minority languages, Lamkang. "In a place like India,
with more than a billion people and hundreds of languages and
dialects, minority languages and their speakers are sometimes
considered insignificant," she says, pointing out that an estimated 77
million people speak Tamil, 1.5 million speak Meithei and 3,000 to
5,000 speak Lamkang.

"But documenting each language and realizing that each language has
something to contribute to the nation's culture is very important."

Federal Support

Last spring, Chelliah received a National Science Foundation grant of
$89,803 to create an electronic archive of texts in Lamkang, which is
spoken in one region of Manipur and in parts of Bangladesh. She's one
of several faculty members in UNT's Department of Linguistics and
Technical Communication who have received federal funding in recent
years to document and preserve endangered languages. In 2007, Timothy
Montler, Distinguished Research Professor, received a $317,502
Documenting Endangered Languages grant through a joint program of the
National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Humanities to create a dictionary and electronic text archive of
Klallam, the language spoken by the Lower Elwah Klallam American
Indian tribe in northwest Washington. The work was designated an NEH
"We the People" project for promoting knowledge and understanding of
American history and culture.

Montler has spent more than 15 years working with the tribe's cultural
office to preserve the language, which in 1990 had only eight native
speakers. Willem de Reuse, adjunct research professor, received a
$40,000 Documenting Endangered Languages fellowship in 2006 to create
an electronic archive of texts written in Western Apache, which is
mostly spoken on two reservations in central Arizona. The archive will
be completed in 2009. His work also was designated a "We the People"
project by the NEH. De Reuse previously received six years of NSF
funding to write a reference grammar book and compile a dictionary of
the language.

Sadaf Munshi, assistant professor, received $12,000 from the NSF as a
doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin to conduct field
work for her dissertation on a dialect of Burushaski, spoken by
roughly 300 people in Srinagar, her hometown in Kashmir, India. She
has applied for a Documenting Endangered Languages fellowship to focus
on all Burushaski dialects.

International Collaboration

According to the Endangered Language Fund at Yale University, more
than half of the more than 6,000 languages currently spoken in the
world are unlikely to be learned by future generations. Languages like
Lamkang, which are spoken in regions with many other languages, are
disappearing because native speakers increasingly speak the region's
majority language. Chelliah says Lamkang is being increasingly mixed
with Meithei.

"In the past, native Lamkang speakers lived in isolated, agricultural
villages and rarely mixed with outsiders," she says. "Now, a lot of
young people leave for jobs in cities in Manipur, and the language
spoken in the schools is Meithei. Native speakers of Lamkang use some
Meithei words in their conversations."

Chelliah began studying Lamkang only after being introduced to Meithei
in graduate school by a native speaker. She later received a
fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies to live in
Manipur and study Meithei for her doctoral dissertation. Years later,
she collaborated with Harimohon Thounaojam, a native Meithei speaker
who worked with the Language Cell of the Manipur government's
Directorate of Education, to publish a grammar guide to Meithei and a
collection of Meithei texts. In 2005, Thounaojam chose Lamkang as the
subject for his doctoral dissertation, and Chelliah agreed to work
with him again.

"I thought that our research could be an illustration of possible
international collaboration between UNT and students in Manipur who
are interested in linguistics but need technical and methodological
guidance," Chelliah says. In April 2007, she and Thounaojam published
a grammatical sketch on Lamkang. The data came from field work
Thounaojam conducted in Lamkang-speaking villages in Manipur.

Culture and Tradition

In the summer of 2007, Thounaojam came to UNT after Chelliah received
a grant from UNT's Charn Uswachoke International Development Fund to
bring him to campus. He attended Chelliah's linguistics field methods
class, teaching Meithei grammar and Manipur culture and tradition to
the students. Now, he and Chelliah are gathering information about
Lamkang culture and tradition for the computer archive. When completed
in 2010, the archive will include 25 hours of written and audio files
of conversations, monologues, folktales and other naturally occurring
speech patterns to represent a wide variety of interactions between
native speakers of Lamkang.

"I recorded several conversations between a father and his adult son,
talking to each other about a festival in their village. We
transcribed and translated the conversations with their help,"
Chelliah says. "It is in these natural interactions that the true
structure of the language is revealed."
Lamkang texts that currently exist, including local laws and
translations of Psalm 23 and biblical parables, also will be placed in
the archive. Chelliah and Thounaojam will create a corresponding web
site. Visitors to the site will click on certain links for spoken
Lamkang and the transcription and translation. Through the site,
linguists around the world will study Lamkang, and schools could use
the materials in textbooks, Chelliah says.

She hopes her research will contribute to efforts to preserve
Manipur's other minority languages. The region has more than 30
languages, many of which are spoken by only a few thousand people.
"The Lamkang speakers are grateful that someone has taken an interest
in preserving their language," she says. "Indian scholars also are
realizing that to really get a picture of the linguistic history of
the region, they need to understand all of its languages, big and
small."

http://chronicle.com/campusViewpointArticle/Linguist-Saves-Culture

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