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Seifart, Frank, Evans, Nicholas ORCID: 0000-0003-0893-3713, Hammarstrom, Harald and Levinson, Stephen C. (2018). Language documentation twenty-five years on. Language, 94 (4). S. E324 - 22. WASHINGTON: LINGUISTIC SOC AMER. ISSN 1535-0665

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Abstract

This discussion note reviews responses of the linguistics profession to the grave issues of language endangerment identified a quarter of a century ago in the journal Language by Krauss, Hale, England, Craig, and others (Hale et al. 1992). Two and a half decades of worldwide research not only have given us a much more accurate picture of the number, phylogeny, and typological variety of the world's languages, but they have also seen the development of a wide range of new approaches, conceptual and technological, to the problem of documenting them. We review these approaches and the manifold discoveries they have unearthed about the enormous variety of linguistic structures. The reach of our knowledge has increased by about 15% of the world's languages, especially in terms of digitally archived material, with about 500 languages now reasonably documented thanks to such major programs as DoBeS, ELDP, and DEL. But linguists are still falling behind in the race to document the planet's rapidly dwindling linguistic diversity, with around 35-42% of the world's languages still substantially undocumented, and in certain countries (such as the US) the call by Krauss (1992) for a significant professional realignment toward language documentation has only been heeded in a few institutions. Apart from the need for an intensified documentarist push in the face of accelerating language loss, we argue that existing language documentation efforts need to do much more to focus on crosslinguistically comparable data sets, sociolinguistic context, semantics, and interpretation of text material, and on methods for bridging the 'transcription bottleneck', which is creating a huge gap between the amount we can record and the amount in our transcribed corpora.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Seifart, Frank UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Evans, Nicholas UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0003-0893-3713 UNSPECIFIED Hammarstrom, Harald UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Levinson, Stephen C. UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-163299
DOI:	10.1353/lan.2018.0070
Journal or Publication Title:	Language
Volume:	94
Number:	4
Page Range:	S. E324 - 22
Date:	2018
Publisher:	LINGUISTIC SOC AMER
Place of Publication:	WASHINGTON
ISSN:	1535-0665
Language:	English
Faculty:	Unspecified
Divisions:	Unspecified
Subjects:	no entry
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language ENDANGERED LANGUAGES; DISCOURSE BASIS; VITALITY; DIVERSITY; INDEX; EMPOWERMENT; RECLAMATION; FRAMEWORK; GRAMMAR; TRENDS Multiple languages Linguistics; Language & Linguistics Multiple languages
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/16329