Using existing documentation for teaching and learning endangered languages

Abstract

Although the ideal in work with endangered languages is to design collaborative projects that integrate documentation and support for revitalization from the outset, the reality is that many language workers must rely on existing products of documentation to create materials. Traditional documentation, including reference grammars, dictionaries, and texts, was often created primarily for academic audiences and may be unsuitable for learning and inaccessible to nonacademics. However, time pressure and limited corpora result in many community members’ reliance on less-than-ideal resources to support revitalization. This article illustrates the ways in which existing products of language documentation can be used in support of revitalization activities. Drawing on the authors’ varied work with speakers, teachers, and learners of languages of the Americas, this article provides example uses for documentation in curriculum, lesson, and materials development. Attention is paid to finding functional samples of language and getting maximal use from a single product by illustrating multiple uses for individual resources.

Keywords:

• Endangered languages
• language documentation
• revitalization
• curriculum development

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the kindness and support of our many collaborators, especially Ferdinand Mandé, Daryl Baldwin, Dr Mizuki Miyashita, Sieglien Jubithana and Berend Hoff. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers whose helpful suggestions improved this work immeasurably. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Sapién previously published as Racquel-Maía Yamada.

2. We specify language revitalization here to distinguish it from other types of reclamation and revival. Often, revitalization overly emphasizes language when there are other components of cultural renewal (e.g. identity) that may develop with language (Mosley-Howard et al. 2016).

3. See Author 1 (2007) regarding creation of the practical orthography.

4. This text and others like it present an additional problem in that free translations are provided in a language that community members are not literate in. In this particular case, the author has spent a significant amount of time explaining the content of academic resources in a local language so that community members can have access to them. While we acknowledge and have confronted the problem in our own work, a discussion of the limitations presented by documentation that is not accessible to community members – whether physically or because of the particular language it is written in – is outside the scope of this article.

5. Note that literacy development may or may not be a goal for a particular revitalization project.