Course Description
Concern about the threat that language endangerment poses to linguistic diversity and awareness of stakeholders and rightsholders beyond linguistics and academia have brought about a shift in the paradigm of field linguistics. This shift involves moving from traditional grammatical description to comprehensive language documentation, the making and keeping of records of the world’s languages and their patterns of use in their broader cultural and historical context. As language as a social practice is embedded in cultural epistemologies, language documentation is an interdisciplinary enterprise that makes contact with ethnography, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics and other disciplines. This course will provide an overview of this novel and expanding area, focusing on intellectual, methodological and ethical issues of language documentation. Specific topics include the interaction between language documentation and linguistic typology and theory, data collection methods and documentary fieldwork, interdisciplinary approaches to language documentation, tools and best practices in the assembly and archiving of documentary corpora, community engagement and relations, and development of resources for language communities. This course will also explore what ethical linguistic research can look like in a decolonizing framework and why documentation of Indigenous languages cannot be understood in isolation from the cultural, political and social contexts of their speakers.
Area Tags: Language Documentation, Fieldwork, Areal Linguistics, Language Preservation, Typology
(Sessions 1 & 2) Monday/Thursday 3:00-4:20
Location: ILC S405
Instructors: Gabriela Caballero & Nadine Grimm
Gabriela Caballero’s research interests lie in two intersecting domains: documentation and analysis of Indigenous languages of the Americas; and the nature of intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic variation in morphology and phonology, focusing on morphologically complex languages. Much of her research builds upon collaboration with speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages (e.g. Choguita Rarámuri). This work is underscored by a strong commitment to careful description and analysis of understudied languages through projects whose products serve Indigenous communities. She is currently president of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas and a panel member of the Endangered Language Documentation Programme.
Nadine Grimm is an assistant professor in Linguistics at the University of Rochester, where she heads the Language Documentation and Description program. Nadine obtained her Ph.D. from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany, in 2015. Her dissertation, A grammar of Gyeli, received the Panini Award (2019) and the Bloomfield Award (2023). Her research takes place in a descriptive, documentary, and typological framework with a special focus on grammatical tone, language contact, and phonetic features in northwestern Bantu languages. Nadine has held language documentation grants by “DoBeS” on Gyeli (Bantu, Cameroon) and by ELDP on Ikaan (Benue-Congo, Nigeria).
Nadine Grimm will teach this course during Session 1. Gabriela Caballero will teach during Session 2.
