- Tehlikedeki Diller Dergisi
- Cilt: 13 Sayı: 23 - Language Documentation in Comparative Turkic Linguistics Özel Sayı
- Citizens, speakers, and documentation of (endangered) languages and cultures
Citizens, speakers, and documentation of (endangered) languages and cultures
Authors : Peter K. AUSTIN
Pages : 7-19
View : 75 | Download : 83
Publication Date : 2023-12-31
Article Type : Research
Abstract :Over the past 30 years linguists have come to realise that there are immense threats to global linguistic diversity that may mean that around 50% of the world’s 7,000 languages may no longer be spoken by the end of the 21st century because they are endangered and not being passed to future generations. One response by academic researchers has been the creation of a field of Language Documentation (or Documentary Linguistics) that has attracted a host of researchers and large amounts of grant funding, and has developed its own theorisation, recommendations for good practices, publications, and training courses. Language archives of various sorts have been established, including those with global coverage like The Language Archive (www.tla.mpi.nl) and the Endangered Languages Archive (https:// www.elararchive.org/), as well as regional and local archives. Alongside these academic developments, there have been several initiatives to collect language materials created by speakers and others, and to catalogue and map these contributions as a form of ‘citizen science’. In this paper, we will critically examine three such initiatives, Wikitongues (https://wikitongues. org/), the Language Landscape Project (www.languagelandscape.org) originated by students at SOAS, University of London, and the Endangered Languages Project (http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/) initiated by Google and now based at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, USA. Among the issues discussed are: 1. infrastructure for the projects, including web interface and data storage design, human resources, decision-making processes 2. management and vetting of user-contributed content and feedback, including possible copyright or other legal violations 3. identification of contributors and other stakeholders 4. metadata and content tagging and cataloguing 5. mechanisms for outreach and user/contributor engagement We conclude that while citizen science and crowd-sourced data collection may appear to be attractive as research methods, there are a number of challenging issues to be overcome for them to be effective for endangered languages study.Keywords : Vatandaş bilimi, kitle kaynaklı veri, yok olma tehlikesi altındaki diller, üst data, üst belgeleme