here - Linguistic Society of America

Sunday, 6 JanuaryWorkshoppoor, undereducated, and often not literate in any language. Lack of English is a problem, so there is often greater interest inEnglish than maintaining Maay. Nonetheless, there is community concern about younger speakers losing the language.Ross Perlin (University of Bern)Language death by committee? The view from ChinaDiscussions of collaborative methodologies for endangered language fieldwork rarely cover issues of bureaucracy andgovernance, both inside and outside the language community. Based on a collaborative dictionary project around Trung, anendangered Tibeto-Burman language, this poster will consider the idea of a unitary “community”, highlighting the challenge thatthe lack of a clearly defined "community" poses for linguists seeking to work ethically under "community control". The posteralso discusses decisions that linguists working within authoritarian states make about how to interact with officials of doubtfullegitimacy. For example, the project's long-term sustainability depends on getting “buy-in” from the powers-that-be, includingpowerful non-Trung officials, half-Trung people, and Trung who no longer speak the language and live elsewhere. Responding tothis, our informal “dictionary group” soon became a ketizu (a formal study group), and editorial decisions concerning theorthography, the dialect chosen, the nature of publication etc. went “up the chain”.Laura C. Robinson (University of California, Santa Barbara)Collaborative endangered language research: perspectives from the PacificCollaboration is becoming the widely-accepted best practice in linguistic fieldwork (Grenoble 2010), but most work theorizingcollaborative endangered language research has come from researchers working in Australia and the Americas (e.g.,Czaykowska-Higgins 2009, Grinevald 2003, Rice 2006, Rice 2010, Yamada 2007). This paper draws on the presenter’s fieldworkin the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as interviews with other fieldworkers and published accounts of linguistic fieldwork inthe Pacific (e.g., Dobrin 2008, Guérin and Lecrampe 2010, Holton 2009) to support the claim that collaborative fieldwork asenvisioned by researchers from Australia and the Americas is often not possible or desirable in the Pacific. Few trulycollaborative language research projects have been carried out there, and this paper suggests that the fundamentally differentsocial and linguistic setting calls for a fundamentally different model of language research.Olivia N. Sammons (University of Alberta)Collaboration, communities, and distanceThe importance of collaborative partnerships between linguists and endangered language communities has been increasinglyemphasized in recent literature (Rice 2009, Leonard and Haynes 2010, inter alia). However, one aspect of such collaborationseldom discussed is how effective partnerships may be achieved when stakeholders are working at a geographical distance fromone another. This poster presents a comparative study on the effect of distance on collaboration, based on the author's experiencesin two distinct linguistic and social situations, Sauk (ISO 639-3:sac) and Michif (ISO 639-3:crg). In both cases, distance affectshow collaborative partnerships are built and maintained, not only between academic and community members but also acrosscommunities themselves. This poster aims to contribute to a typology of collaborative methodologies by examining both theeffect of distance on collaboration when the notion of 'community' is ill-defined or geographically dispersed, and how suchrelationships may be established and maintained.Racquel-María Yamada (University of Oklahoma)Sieglien Jubithana Oosterwolde (St. Gerardus School and Kari’nja Language School, Suriname)From Konomerume to Oregon: training in the community-collaborative contextSince 2004, I have been working with members of the Konomerume community in Suriname to document, describe, and supportrevitalization of the non-prestige Aretyry dialect of Kari’nja (Cariban). Despite limited access to formal schooling, communitymembers are motivated to learn techniques for documentation, principles of linguistic description, and methods of preservationand revitalization.In 2010, a nine-member language team traveled from Suriname to Oregon to participate in the 2010 Institute on Field Linguisticsand Language Documentation (InField), and the Northwest Indian Language Institute’s (NILI) annual Summer Institute. Thisposter illustrates the process, challenges, and outcomes—both tangible and intangible—of that journey. The training that Kari’njateam members received at NILI and InField serves as a foundation for additional projects also described here. Finally, I explorewhy training for speech community members is appropriate in a collaborative context and how it demonstrates active engagementwith communities.116