Summer 2010
Many thanks to those who showed up at our second meeting! Here is a new page with all the handouts and other materials: Resource page
Here are some questions (thanks to Mark Ulrich, Seunghun Lee and Patrick-André Mather) which I have tried to address:
What languages should we be looking for? Are dialects also included in this study?
We are interested both in dialects and languages. In most cases, it is diificult to tell dialects and languages apart. Common usage also refers to completely different languages as dialects in many countries. So, if someone says they speak Greek, by all means, try to find out what dialect of Greek, since many Greek varieties are underdocumented and moribund. To make the project easier to understand for the people we speak with, we can simply say that we are looking for “minority languages and dialects”, which in most countries overlaps with endangered languages and dialects.
Here are three approaches to language tracking in the city:
(i) Look for the languages in your neghborhood. We have already solidified some neighborhood volunteer groups and hopefully in the next couple of days we will have more areas covered.
(ii) Look for languages which you happen to have a particular interest in. One group of volunteers happens to be particularly interested in Romani (Gypsy) languages, so they are surveying the Fortune Telling establishments of the Upper West Side. If there are other volunteers with particular language interests we can organize similar groups around them.
(iii) Look for the languages that your own language skills give you access to. Two of the NYC “hotspots” we mentioned at the meeting are Roosevelt Avenue and Coney Island. Spanish speakers are needed to cover an important segment of Roosevelt Ave. while Russian speakers are needed to cover Coney Island. Anyone who can speak these languages can pitch in in those areas.
Regarding web resources, Ethnologue and UNESCO provide much useful information but they both also have conspicuous gaps, especially the latter. The coverage of the UNESCO map is very uneven although this is not obvious because it lists endangered languages for all countries and thus has the appearance of a finished product. In reality, the adequacy of UNESCO’s information appears to be completely dependent on how many linguists they were able to consult with for a given area. Those areas for which they could not consult many linguists tend to underrepresent the number of endangered languages. To take a concrete example, UNESCO only lists two languages of Mali as endangered: Banka and Tamaceq. But if we just look at the Ethnologue, which may very well be incomplete itself, we find at least three more which could be added to the list based on their number of speakers and reported language use:
Kogoro – 15,000 speakers
Language use Being replaced by Bambara. Kagoro now spoken only in a few corners of Kaarta. Also use Bamanankan [bam], Soninke [snk], or Hassaniyya Arabic [mey].
Pana – 2,800 in Mali, 5,000 in Burkina Faso
Language use (Mali) Favorable toward using Marka [rkm], Jula [dyu], or Bamanankan [bam]. Also use Jula [dyu]
Language use (Burkina Faso) All ages. Also use Bambara [bam] or Jula [dyu]. Young people are free to use Jula and Marka-Dafin [rkm] in the home.
Bangi Me – 2,000 (7 villages)
Ethnologue’s language maps can also be of great help when talking with someone about the various languages of his or her country. Language maps are available for almost every country. The link for these is at the top of the page of the country listings. This is an example of one of the language maps of Mexico.
The more recent immigrants will be able to tell you whether or not young people back home are still speaking their heritage language or are shifting to regional or national languages. This will provide an important piece of evidence which is most often unavailable elsewhere. Ethnologue will give you an estimate of how many speakers there are and occasionally offers extra information regarding endangerment status but this information can of course be outdated.
Should we be looking for languages such as Quechua, or is this safely off the endangered list?
Quechua is an example of an indigenous minority language of Latin America but at the same time one that has been historically expanding at the expense of smaller neighboring languages. Nonetheless, as with many “safe” languages, there are many dialects of Quechua which are highly endangered and worthy of further documentation. So while it is not considered high-priority as a whole, a Quechua dialect survey would still make a very interesting project. (If anyone happens to be interested in this, look no further than the vendors in Union Square who sell the Apache T-shirts that read “Fighting terrorism since 1492″. They are mostly Quechua and would be a good place to start.) UPDATE: We have had several Quechua speakers contact us recently and would like to start projects with some of them.
Which language the group ultimately decides to work with will depend on several factors, the level of endangerment just being one. A language which is not severely endangered but which has one or more speakers here that are enthusiastic about the project and you think would make good consultants can take precedence over others. Also, the level of previous documentation for a language should also be a factor we take into consideration, i.e. Has the language been written before? Does it have a descriptive grammar? etc. (Thanks to Patrick-André Mather for emphasizing this point.)
Will study participants be given a central phone to call to deal with their questions and concerns, rather than calling the individual field data collection people, like ourselves?
The (mobile) office number is 917-232-9735. If nobody can get to the phone please leave a message and one of us will call you back soon.
Please let me know what further questions come up and I will post the answers here!
Thanks again to all of you for your time and energy!
Daniel Kaufman, ELA
