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Language documentation

Subfield of linguistics

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  • 6 chapters

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Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization. This record can be public or private depending on the needs of the community and the purpose of the documentation. In practice, language documentation can range from solo linguistic anthropological fieldwork to the creation of vast online archives that contain dozens of different languages, such as FirstVoices or OLAC.

Language documentation provides a firmer foundation for linguistic analysis in that it creates a corpus of materials in the language. The materials in question can range from vocabulary lists and grammar rules to children's books and translated works. These materials can then support claims about the structure of the language and its usage. This should be seen as a basic taxonomic task for linguistics, identifying the range of languages and their characteristics.

While various linguists had already been practising language documentation during the 20th century, the discipline was established as a specific field within linguistics following a 1998 publication by Nikolaus Himmelmann, which many understand as foundational.

Methods

Typical steps involve recording, maintaining metadata, transcribing (often using the International Phonetic Alphabet and/or a "practical orthography" made up for that language), annotation and analysis, translation into a language of wider communication, archiving and dissemination. Critical is the creation of good records in the course of doing language description. The materials can be archived, but not all archives are equally adept at handling language materials preserved in varying technological formats, and not all are equally accessible to potential users.

Language documentation complements language description, which aims to describe a language's abstract system of structures and rules in the form of a grammar or dictionary. By practising good documentation in the form of recordings with transcripts and then collections of texts and a dictionary, a linguist works better and can provide materials for use by speakers of the language. New technologies permit better recordings with better descriptions which can be housed in digital archives such as AILLA, Pangloss, or Paradisec. These resources can then be made available to the speakers. The first example of a grammar with a media corpus is Thieberger's grammar of South Efate (2006).

Language documentation has also given birth to new specialized publications, such as the free online and peer-reviewed journal Language Documentation & Conservation and the SOAS working papers Language Documentation & Description.

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