Plenary: Documenting enduring cultures

Abstract

This talk presents findings from my ongoing ethnographic documentary study on how present-day speakers of Cayuse, Nez Perce, and Sahaptin utilize the linguistic practices of their speech communities at a time when their ancestral languages are severely constrained by language endangerment and language shift. I adopt the contemporary concerns of an ethnographically-informed documentary linguistics to show how the linguistic resources of a speech community serve to maintain and transmit culture. Methodologically, this investigation employs digital video to capture and record three interrelated empirical domains of language use, these are: multimodal interaction, interactional structure, and linguistic practices. My key concern in such an approach is to establish links between language use and socially situated communicative interactions as a means to understanding how everyday language use motivates, gives meaning to, or otherwise organizes language, culture, and society. Discovering such linkages is a result of understanding that many traditions are discursive achievements and worthy of documentation. Thus, my own commitment to this type of documentary orientation emerged over the course of my current field research, my speaker status in the speech communities where I conduct my research, as well from the deeper commitments to language and culture found there.