1.1 Introduction

Contributed by Merrion Dale, Marty Heaton, Shobhana Chelliah, Rachel Garton

Speaker communities, linguists, folklorists, and anthropologists are some of the groups that aim to record language samples to document language and culture. In the past twenty years, language documenters have arrived at protocols for efficient collection and curation of language samples.  

This module will provide a protocol tailored for community documenters seeking to record their community's indigenous language for preservation and revitalization purposes. Using freeware, an affordable language documentation recording kit, step-by-step processes for metadata creation, and illustrating transcription techniques, the training provided in this module can help you create a collection of language samples for culture and language revitalization or linguistic analysis.

Objectives

After successful completion of this module, you will have reviewed: 

  1. What to collect and why
  2. How to use a language documentation kit for audio and video recording
  3. How to scan documents and digitize analog audio recordings

By the end of this module, you will have:

  1. Created an audio recording
  2. Created a video recording
  3. Scanned a document

Readings


Chelliah, S. (2021). Why Language Documentation Matters.  Springer Briefs in Linguistics. Dordrecht:  Springer Academic Press.
Chelliah, S. (2018). The design and implementation of documentation projects for spoken languages. In K. Regh and L. Campbell (Eds.). Oxford University handbook on endangered languages, (pp.147-167). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190610029.013.9
Good, J. (2011). Data and Language Documentation. In P. Austin and J. Sallabank (Eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, (pp. 212-234). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Available from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282733657_Data_and_language_documentation
Podesva, R. and Zsiga, E. (2013). Sound recordings: Acoustic and articulatory data. In R.J. Podesva and D. Sharma (Eds.). Research Methods in Linguistics, (pp.169-194). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Woodbury, A. (2011). Language Documentation. In P. Austin and J. Sallabank (Eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, (pp.159-186). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Hints and Tips

Install the following free software on your laptop for use over the course and in the future: