9 - Language documentation

Summary

The spread of writing to vernacular languages, along with ideologies of language standardization and practices of manuscript curation, constituted language documentation on an enormous scale over a millennial time frame. This chapter considers how a broad, inclusive idea of endangered-language documentation might be framed in order best to realize its potential, avoid pitfalls, and meet its challenges. It also considers the context and development of endangered-language documentation in academic research. But the stakeholders in documentation include the communities in which endangered languages are spoken. The chapter focuses mainly on documentation and community stakeholders and has little to say of wider publics except as they may form part of the community context of endangered-language documentation. Linguists must be flexible and inventive about how and when to accomplish traditional linguistic agendas, and training takes centre stage as projects involve many people, with different expertise, roles and levels of training.