Reflections on language community training

Abstract

I reflect upon four decades of language community training, treating Watahomigie & Yamamoto (1992) and England (1992) as the starting point. Because the training activities these papers report began in the 1970s, there is a convincing and growing literature on training, including work published in the years since Himmelmann’s (1998) article. The upshot of my reflections is this central point: Language documentation is better when it occurs alongside an active training component. Underlying this point is an acknowledgement that linguists and communities are engaged in mutual training, and in fact, that a binary distinction between linguist and community member is a false dichotomy. The Chickasaw Model, a model that formalizes training, linguistic analysis, documentation, and revitalization as a feedback loop (cf. Fitzgerald & Hinson 2013; 2016), offers a way to capture a fully integrated approach to training. I conclude with nine significant contributions growing out of the training literature.