International symposium "Documenting and describing endangered and minority languages and literatures in the digital age", January 19-20

Event organized at Inalco by the Plurality of Languages and Identities: Didactics - Acquisition - Mediations (PLIDAM) team, in hybrid.

Organization : Liliane Hodieb, PLIDAM (Inalco)

Thursday, January 19, 2023 - 08:30-19:30 - Auditorium
PLC, 65, rue des Grands Moulins - 75013 Paris

Friday, January 20, 2023 - 13:30-18:00 - Auditorium Dumézil
Maison de la recherche - 2, rue de Lille - 75007 Paris

Documenting and describing minority and endangered languages and literatures in the digital age: epistemology, practices and challenges

International Colloquium

In the traditional conception of documenting and describing languages and literatures, as a discipline whose ultimate goal is the conservation of the world's languages and literatures, the production of grammars, dictionaries, and miscellaneous texts such as narratives or epics, is seen as an end in itself (Woodbury, 2003:35). For typologists, a major utility of linguistic documentation is the adequate representation of language "types". In this respect, the seminal work of Greenberg (1963) focused on identifying the limits of interlinguistic variation by classifying languages according to construction types, and relegating intralinguistic variation to the background. Such an undertaking is necessarily dependent on the nature of the data and the methods used to collect it, which in this case consists mainly of unnatural utterances with no defined context. However, we are witnessing a reorientation of the main purpose of linguistic documentation: a representation of languages based on their use in natural contexts. This new objective, in which the production of grammars and dictionaries is no longer an end in itself, but a constituent element of the apparatus, i.e. of the entire procedure, is also influencing the latter and its uses. For example, the social aspect of language, in particular the phenomenon of social cognition, i.e. all the cognitive processes involved in social interactions, is interesting to compare from one culture to another (Schnell et al., 2021:15). But the question of the corpus remains no less real, particularly in an era when the digital is becoming omnipresent and inescapable, and when, hit by a pandemic (Covid-19), several regions of the world are inaccessible, making field research in these areas impossible. For Woodbury (2003:43-17), a good corpus is firstly diverse, representing a variety of situations, participants, registers, literary genres and so on. Secondly, it is broad; moreover, it is continually developing. It is transparent, preservable, portable and ethical.

How can all these criteria be met for languages with only a hundred or so speakers left, scattered around the world due to social, political or health crises, and in a context where the pressure exerted by globalization on the whole world is leading to the rapid abandonment of indigenous languages and cultures in favor of dominant languages? From a didactic point of view, how can field practice be combined with theory in these same contexts? What about metadata, once considered marginal, but which, if taken into account as a full-fledged constituent of the corpus, would provide original insights? And, should we rely more on written or oral/signed corpora?

We might also wonder about the documentation of variation in the context of minority and endangered languages. For example, how can grammatical description and analysis of variation be combined? Or what approaches and methods would be best suited to documenting variation in such language communities? Furthermore, to what extent can interdisciplinarity, in particular the integration of processes from automatic language processing (NLP) or sociolinguistics, benefit researchers working on minority and endangered languages and more broadly linguistic theory and the phenomenon of language change (Meyerhoff 2019)?

An equally important question is the place of natives in the documentation and description process. Cruz (2020:43) points out in this regard that, as a discipline, linguistic documentation and description was created by and for members of academic institutions for whom collaborative work with indigenous people was almost surreal. There are, however, unique advantages associated with indigenous data collection, such as the trust of the community being researched, which a non-native researcher must take the time to build up - something that doesn't happen overnight. There is an undeniable lack of integration of natives not only in data collection, but also in analysis and academic reflection. How can this be remedied?

Finally, a difficulty of another order, rarely mentioned, concerns women researchers. Cruz (2020:49) points out that in some cultures, women undertaking fieldwork are anathematized because their place is supposedly elsewhere than in research.

This symposium is intended to be an opportunity to reflect on these questions, which are not exhaustive, but also to share testimonies from male and female researchers, particularly in linguistics, didactics, literature and anthropology. The colloquium will be held in hybrid mode.

Scientific Committee
James Essegbey, University of Florida
Amina Mettouchi, EPHE, LLACAN
Peter Stockinger, Inalco, PLIDAM
Thomas Szende, Inalco, PLIDAM