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.

The observation that guides this chapter is that the place of speakers in language documentation is being transformed by linguists' understanding of language endangerment not just as a problem of diminishing data for the science of language, but as a problem of social justice and human flourishing that calls upon linguistic expertise for its amelioration. The chapter addresses some of the main issues surrounding the role of speakers that we see emerging in documentary linguistics, bringing to bear examples both from linguistics and from neighbouring disciplines. There are situations in which the preservation of cultural form is alien to the ideological complex by which the cultural life of a community is constituted. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, intense public attention was drawn to the issue of minority and indigenous rights by a number of international and grassroots organizations.