Table Of ContentLanguage Documentation and Endangerment in Africa
Culture and Language Use (clu)
Studies in Anthropological Linguistics
issn 1879-5838
CLU-SAL publishes monographs and edited collections, culturally oriented
grammars and dictionaries in the cross- and interdisciplinary domain of
anthropological linguistics or linguistic anthropology. The series offers a forum for
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on a deep understanding of the function of speech forms in the speech community
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Editor
Gunter Senft
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Nijmegen
Volume 17
Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa
Edited by James Essegbey, Brent Henderson and Fiona Mc Laughlin
Language Documentation
and Endangerment in Africa
subtitle
Edited by
James Essegbey
Brent Henderson
Fiona Mc Laughlin
University of Florida Gainesville
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/clu.17
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2015020313 (print) / 2015029246 (e-book)
isbn 978 90 272 4452 9 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6815 0 (e-book)
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Table of contents
Introduction 1
James Essegbey, Brent Henderson and Fiona Mc Laughlin
Section 1. Language endangerment and documentation
chapter 1
Unintended consequences of methodological and practical responses
to language endangerment in Africa 15
Felix K. Ameka
chapter 2
Different cultures, different attitudes: But how different
is “the African situation” really? 37
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
chapter 3
Ideologies and typologies of language endangerment in Africa 59
Friederike Lüpke
chapter 4
The role of colonial languages in language endangerment in Africa 107
Bruce Connell
chapter 5
Can a language endanger itself? Reshaping repertoires in urban Senegal 131
Fiona Mc Laughlin
chapter 6
“Is this my language?” Developing a writing system
for an endangered-language community 153
James Essegbey
chapter 7
Development, language revitalization, and culture: The case of the Mayan
languages of Guatemala, and their relevance for African languages 177
Peter Rohloff and Brent Henderson
vi Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa
chapter 8
Some challenges of language documentation in African multilingual settings 195
Emmanuel Ngué Um
Section 2. How to document particular domains or use documentary data
to address specific issues
chapter 9
Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork 215
Mark Dingemanse
chapter 10
Out of context: Documenting languages in immigrant
and refugee communities 239
Brent Henderson
chapter 11
Archaeological inspiration and historical inference:
Directions for Edoid linguistic studies 253
Ronald Schaefer and Francis Egbokhare
chapter 12
Describing endangered languages: Experiences from a PhD grammar
project in Africa 277
Frank Seidel
Index 313
Language index 317
Introduction
James Essegbey, Brent Henderson and Fiona Mc Laughlin
Although linguists have been involved in language endangerment and documen-
tation issues for a long time, it is generally accepted that a strong shift occurred
in this domain towards the end of the 1980s and early 1990s when the plight
of endangered languages became more widely recognized within the linguistic
disciplines and the public domain. With attention and funding from public and
private organizations such as UNESCO, NSF, DOBES, ELDP, and many others,
dozens of publications, resolutions and conferences were spawned, leading to
talk of a new discipline within the field, documentary linguistics, with its own
emerging set of discourses, definitions and best practices. (Himmelmann 1998;
Woodbury 2003; Gippert et al. 2003; etc.). However, despite the fact that Africa is
said to possess as much as a third of the world’s languages, hundreds of which are
endangered, there is a feeling mostly among Africanists that the discourse on lan-
guage endangerment does not reflect the African situation. As McGill and Austin
(2012) put it “Research on applied language documentation has so far been heavily
skewed towards the (post-colonial) linguistic situations found in Australia and the
Americas, and it is far from clear that the kinds of activities that have been prac-
ticed in these former settlement colonies can straightforwardly be transferred into
the African arena.” In this volume, linguists engaged in documentation activities
with African languages offer insights on language endangerment and documen-
tary linguistics that might not be seen as clearly through an Australo-American
lens. In some cases, consensus in the field is challenged by these insights, but we
believe that in most cases what we offer here is a complement to the field’s existing
literature, as well as the comment that many issues in the field of documentary
linguistics are by no means settled or fully explored and defining aspects of the
field need to be continually under discussion, incorporating global insights. To
base the field’s criteria for language endangerment, its approach to ethics, or its
methods of language revitalization solely on limited experiences from particular
geographic, historical and political contexts would be a huge mistake.
doi 10.1075/clu.17.001int
© 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 James Essegbey, Brent Henderson and Fiona Mc Laughlin
What we do not offer here is anything like a manual on doing language docu-
mentation in Africa, as if that were possible. As a true reflection of the heterogene-
ity of the continent, the insights and opinions offered in the following papers are
varied and not always convergent. We hope, though, that by offering these papers
all in one volume the reader will gain some insights into ways in which language
endangerment and documentation efforts in Africa might be quite distinct from
other contexts. The volume is divided into two sections: the first section discusses
general issues related to language endangerment and documentation while the
second section discusses how to document particular domains or how to use
documentary data to address specific issues.
Ameka begins Chapter 1 with a look at how some prominent Africanists have
distinguished themselves by opposing some of the tenets of documentary lin-
guistics. Newman for instance has been the most ardent opponent of what he
refers to as the “the language endangerment movement.” His writing on the subject
includes an article under the provocative title “the endangered languages issue as
a hopeless cause,” and in 2013 he gave a talk at the Linguistics Department at the
School of Oriental and African Studies under the title “the law of unintended con-
sequences: how the endangered languages movement undermines field linguistics
as a scientific enterprise.” Newman rejects the attention and resources that are
being devoted to endangered languages not because of the intrinsic value of the
languages themselves but because they are endangered. At his talk at SOAS he said:
Any linguist who is a scientist needs to provide scientific justification for why he
or she wants to work on a language […] In my opinion the fact that a language is
endangered is not enough.
Like Newman, Ladefoged (1992) also objects to making arguments for the docu-
mentation of languages based on “political considerations,” a sentiment that has
also been expressed by Mufwene (2006).
One of the tenets of documentary linguistics which Newman objects to is the
call for linguists to engage in what he calls “linguistics social work.” This is in rela-
tion to suggestions such as the following from Himmelmann (2006: 17):
[it] is an integral part of the documentation framework elaborated in this book
that it considers it an essential task of language documentation projects to support
language maintenance efforts wherever such support is needed and welcomed by
the community being documented.
Indeed, the approaches to language maintenance may be the area where perspec-
tives from the African context diverge most heavily from the established prac-
tices of the field, as well as from each other. McGill and Austin (2012) report that
a number of Africanists who participated in a Workshop on Applied Language
Introduction 3
Documentation in sub-Saharan Africa held on the 14th May 2011 also rejected the
call for linguists to engage in maintenance and revitalization. According to them,
the reasons for the objection of the Africanists could be summed up as follows:
[As] researchers our ethical responsibility to our universities and funders is to
carry out and publish disinterested research of the highest quality without being
drawn into the time-consuming application of this research. We have no respon-
sibilities to the communities we are working with beyond following a general
ethical code of conduct in our individual contracts with our research subjects
(for example ensuring that informed consent applies, that they are appropriately
recompensed and that data is used ethically). (McGill and Austin 2012: 9–10)
As Ameka argues, however, there is a tendency in these discussions to conflate
activities such as disseminating research materials with language revitaliza-
tion efforts, and the two need to be distinguished. While language materials are
needed for revitalization efforts, support for the provision of such materials does
not necessarily constitute support for revitalization. Similarly, raising misgiv-
ings about language revitalization does not necessarily mean that one is against
the production and dissemination of materials to language communities. McGil
and Austin (2012), for example, mention Dimmendaal’s and Blench’s caution
regarding the revitalization of dying languages in the same breath as they men-
tion Newman’s aversion to “linguistic social work.” Dimmendaal reiterates his
misgivings about language revitalization in Chapter 2 of this volume. However
he does not raise any objection to the production and dissemination of materials
for the language community.
So why is it that for the most part Africanists are not swayed by the moral
arguments for revitalization the way, for instance, their colleagues working on
Australian Aboriginal languages are? In Chapter 2, Dimmendaal shares his expe-
riences from what one might describe as the ideal situation for the success of any
documentation project: he was approached by elders of the Tima community in
south Sudan who were concerned that their language was giving way to Arabic.
The community was highly motivated and willing to mobilize to reverse the situ-
ation. They had language committees that worked with the documentation team
on the orthography for the language and by the end of the project had primers, a
dictionary, and a picture book with trees and shrubs in the Tima area and their
names. The Tima people even considered introducing the language into the cur-
riculum. Yet, in spite of all of this Dimmendaal declares revitalization of the lan-
guage to be a lost cause. Perhaps the most important reason for his pessimism, in
our view, is financial. Comparing the African situation to the former Soviet Union
states and referring to Grenoble and Whaley (2006), he points to the futility of
guaranteeing equal rights to languages without adequate financial backing. There
