Volume 02 Issue 1 : Language Documentation & Conservation

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/1521

Language Documentation & Conservation is a fully refereed, open-access journal sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center and published exclusively in electronic form by the University of Hawai’i Press.

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
  • Item
    Diglossia, Bilingualism, and the Revitalization of Written Eastern Cham
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Brunelle, Marc
    Eastern Cham is an Austronesian language spoken in south-central Vietnam. The sociolinguistic situation of Eastern Cham communities is characterized by a combination of diglossia and widespread Cham-Vietnamese bilingualism. These factors have had an important impact on the effectiveness of recent and controversial attempts to standardize and revitalize the traditional Cham script, akhăr thrah. The spelling reforms and first language programs currently implemented are described, and the reactions from the community are discussed. Various possible paths for the development of literacy in Eastern Cham are proposed and the impact of language attitudes and ideology on their chances of success are briefly reviewed.
  • Item
    Static Palatography for Language Fieldwork
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Anderson, Victoria B.
    This article describes how to do static palatography, a way to collect articulatory records about speech sounds that can be used either in the field or in the laboratory. Palatography creates records of the contact pattern of the tongue on the roof of the mouth during an utterance, and when the actual dimensions of the palate are known, can be a rich source of data about articulatory strategies. This paper (1) instructs the reader about the tools and methods needed to collect palatograms (records of contact on the roof of the mouth) and linguograms (records of contact on the tongue); (2) shows how to collect three-dimensional information about the size and shape of a speaker’s hard palate; (3) illustrates how to incorporate these three types of records into life-size, anatomically accurate midsagittal diagrams of speakers’ articulations; and (4) demonstrates how palatograms can be measured (and how linguograms can be categorized) in order to statistically compare articulatory strategies across speech sounds and/or across speakers.
  • Item
    Table of Contents, 2(1)
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Language Documentation & Conservation
  • Item
    Review of Emu
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Williams, Briony
  • Item
    Book Notice: Naman: A Vanishing Language of Malakula (Vanuatu)
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Bartelson, Emily
  • Item
    Writing an Endangered Language
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Guérin, Valérie
    This paper reports on Mavea, an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu. The state of endangerment of Mavea is first evaluated using UNESCO’s framework for assessing language vitality. The framework’s nine criteria are applied to Mavea, and the results demonstrate that the language is unquestionably endangered. If this language shift is to be reversed, one of the first steps in doing so is to document the language. Materials in and on the language have the potential to restore the language’s prestige, or to restore its usage through vernacular literacy. In the case of Mavea, many community members became eager to see printed versions of the materials I had collected during the documentation process, but the language had no writing system. Thus, this paper additionally describes the Mavea community’s efforts to establish orthographic conventions for their language and their desire to disseminate the resultant written materials throughout the community. This grassroots interest in vernacular literacy is argued to be a beneficial step towards reversing negative language attitudes.
  • Item
    Rescuing Legacy Data
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Schmidt, Thomas ; Bennöhr, Jasmine
    This paper discusses issues that arise in the transformation of electronic language data from outdated to modern, sustainable formats. We first describe the problem and then present four different cases in which corpora of spoken language were converted from legacy formats to an XML-based representation. For each of the four cases, we describe the conversion workflow and discuss the difficulties that we had to overcome. Based on this experience, we formulate some more general observations about transforming legacy data and conclude with a set of best practice recommendations for a more sustainable handling of language corpora.
  • Item
    Researching and Documenting the Languages of Tanzania
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Muzale, Henry R.T. ; Rugemalira, Josephat M.
    This paper describes the challenges that researchers have encountered during six years of implementing a research and documentation project for the languages of Tanzania. It discusses the methods evolved by the project researchers for the production of a language atlas for Tanzania and presents preliminary results from the research. The results show that the language with the most native speakers, Sukuma, has twice as many as its closest rival, Kiswahili. The paper also presents an account of the research for documenting the grammasr and vocabularies of the languages of Tanzania. The expected impact of this particular form of documentation, as well as the limits, are discussed. It is argued that a language needs to be unchained from politically imposed shackles in order for a society to reap the full benefits of its cultural resources.
  • Item
  • Item
    Review of The Tailenders
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008-06) Grimes, Joseph E.
The copyright for all articles published by Language Documentation & Conservation are held by their respective authors. All works are made available through a Creative Commons license.