11 - About Researcher Ethics and Activism

Summary

The field of language endangerment and documentary linguistics, which developed in the last thirty years in response to massive global language endangerment and loss, has introduced high ethical standards for linguists who work in endangered language communities. These ethical standards are based on ideas of empowerment of language communities and their involvement in collaborative work (Cameron et al. 1997; Rice 2004; Yamada 2007; Leonard and Haynes 2010). Relying on the author’s own experiences with community-oriented language documentation in small endangered language enclaves in Croatia over the period of more than ten years, this paper problematizes some of the assumptions of this approach to language documentation and elaborate on the meaning, obstacles to and possible and desirable extent of linguists’ activism in this area of linguistic practice. In particular, the discussion revolves around the issues of disciplinary ideologies, scholars’ positionality, and community representation while illustrative examples come from an inventory of the author’s own dilemmas and actions. It is proposed that definitions of and expectations for language activism and advocacy, like the notions of collaboration and ‘giving back’ in documentary linguistics, will benefit from remaining flexible and highly responsive to the social nature of communities and sociohistorical contexts in which linguists are doing their work.