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41984.mp3 (28.63 MB)

Date

2017-03-05

Authors

Yamada, Masahiro

Yamamoto, Fumi

Yokoyama-Tokunaga, Akiko

Shimoji, Kayoko

Asakawa, Yurie

Matsumura, Yukie

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Yamada, Masahiro
Yamamoto, Fumi
Yokoyama-Tokunaga, Akiko
Shimoji, Kayoko
Asakawa, Yurie
Matsumura, Yukie

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We wish to share the method of our picture book making project that involves collaboration among language community members, linguists, illustrators, and designers. As case studies of abstraction and application, we report multilingual picture books that we have been producing in four endangered Ryukyuan languages in Japan (Okinoerabu/Tarama/Taketomi/Yonaguni). Two of them have an original story created by a native speaker, and the other two takes up a local traditional folk tale. We will explain (1) the features of the picture book packages and (2) the creation processes of them. They aim at (a) documenting endangered languages, (b) facilitating the language use/learning among the younger generations, and (c) raising local language experts. Each picture book comes as a package of three parts; (i) a multilingual story and illustrations, (ii) a detailed linguistic explanation, and (iii) an audio CD of reading the story. Part-(ii) includes a precise but easy-to-use orthography (modified hiragana) proposed for the target language, a phoneme chart and its explanation, and five-line annotations of the full story (original story in the orthography, Japanese translation, morphologically analyzed representation in IPA and the orthography, and word-by-word translation). Illustration and the story contents of the part-(i) make the picture books attractive by themselves, so that they can even catch the attention of those who are not so interested in the endangered situation of the language. Part-(ii) is dedicated to raise the local community members’ objective knowledge of their language. This is to facilitate the younger generations’ use and learning of the local language along with the part-(iii) audio CD, and to raise local language experts. We emphasize that the creation process of a picture book plays an important role in language revitalization. Language community members actively participate in the creation process; they receive a systematic training by the field linguists who have been writing the reference grammar, and become able to describe their language in technical manner. This can be seen as an empowerment of the language community members aiming that they can proceed to future projects receiving less and less support from outside experts. We believe that; facilitating creative activities and linguistic knowledge among the language community members develops the idea that they are actively in charge of the language revitalization; preserving traditional stories in a form of visually attractive and useful content is effective for language revitalization. Our self-ran cloud funding system will also be presented.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10125/41984

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5th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC)