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Saturday, 6 JanuarySymposiumMissionaries and Scholars:The Overlapping Agendas of Linguists in the FieldPacific D2:00 – 5:00 PMOrganizer:Participants:Lise M. Dobrin (University of Virginia)Jeff Good (University at Buffalo, State University of New York)William Svelmoe (Saint Mary’s College)Courtney Handman (University of Chicago)Patience Epps (University of Texas, Austin)Ken Olson (SIL International)Daniel Everett (Illinois State University)With the contemporary rise in concern over language endangerment, academic linguists are taking a renewed interest in fieldwork and,in so doing, reconfirming their dependence on tools and information created by missionary institutions, particularly SIL International.The sociolinguistic situation of many languages is known to western linguists through the results of SIL-sponsored surveys anddisseminated through the authoritative voice of the Ethnologue, SIL's global language inventory. Academic linguists depend on fontsdistributed by SIL in order to digitally encode the language material they collect in the field, and they depend on SIL-producedsoftware (such as Shoebox/Toolbox) to organize and store their data. SIL linguists have taken a leading role in the currentdevelopment of standards for endangered language documentation; indeed, the language codes used by Ethnologue are now beingadopted as the International Standards Organization (ISO) standard for labeling languages. And like fieldworkers from otherdisciplines, academic linguists regularly appeal to missionaries for practical assistance in the field (making contacts and selecting afieldsite, arranging housing and transportation, learning about the culture, etc.).Clearly, academic and mission linguists share certain agendas--an interest in language description and an interest in human beings,including those on the peripheries of modernity and world power. However, because their goals are ultimately distinct, the agendas ofmissionary and academic linguists overlap only partially. Academic linguists have more than once expressed concern that missionlinguists work counter to their moral agendas in some areas of the world. And the reliance on mission-sponsored tools is underwrittenby no guarantee that those tools will continue to be supported should mission goals for any reason be transformed. The divergentinterests of missionary and academic linguists is nowhere more apparent than in the diminishing deployment of mission linguists tothose languages that are least vital, and hence least in need of vernacular language religious materials--precisely the languages thatacademic linguistics now deems in most urgent need of documentation.This symposium acknowledges and explores the relationship between academic and mission linguistics through accounts of theireffects on local people in particular field settings; evaluation of their resources, training practices, and organizational cultures; andsimilar topics. The orientation is forward-looking: to consider the implications of our partially overlapping interests for the future ofbasic linguistic research. Especially given the moral framing of the endangered languages agenda in academic linguistics, it isappropriate to ask whether it is desirable--or even possible--for field linguistics (and hence the core of the endangered languageresearch paradigm) to proceed in an academic setting without the support of mission-based infrastructure. In examining theseinstitutional issues we hope to assess the limitations and advantages of academic linguistics' reliance on its sister discipline at ahistorical juncture when fieldwork is of greater importance than perhaps ever before.91