Language is among the most salient human characteristics. However, a global crisis is looming, with an unprecedented number of the world's languages estimated to disappear before century's end. As languages fall silent when there are no remaining fluent first language speakers, they will take with them a unique entry into understanding the capabilities of the human mind. In addition, the loss of languages will end the opportunity to gain insight into local knowledge of the places where they were spoken, as well as the human history and prehistory of those who spoke them. Nearly one third of the world's six to seven thousand languages are threatened due to the internal pressures of multilingualism. Multilingualism is the use of two or more languages, either by a community or by an individual. Linguists have responded to the challenge of language endangerment by attempting to undertake rich multimedia documentation of such languages before they disappear. However, in many places where multilingualism is common, the languages are under-documented because of insufficient infrastructure and training. This workshop will offer training for documenting languages in these contexts. Such training is necessary for three important reasons. First, it will fill the scholarly gaps for languages with little or no documentation. Second, documentation of these languages will increase the scientific understanding of the interaction between multilingualism and language endangerment. Third, it offers scientists the opportunity to contribute to the creation of a record of threatened human languages. Broader impacts in this project include the facilitation of new international collaborations, the training of a new generation of language documenters in a diverse linguistic region, and opportunities for international research experience for graduate students and junior researchers.
This workshop will convene with its focus on endangered African languages, which are distributed over diverse multilingual environments. This workshop aims to address this situation through the transfer of skills and the training of West African and American graduate students and junior researchers in state-of-the-art techniques of language documentation and data management. The workshop, which will be held at the University of Education in Winneba, Ghana, will be staffed by an international cohort of experts in documentary linguistics from the United States, Europe and Africa. Participants will have access to an international network of researchers in endangered language documentation. This workshop integrates theory and technique with actual practice in language documentation. Instructors and students will be involved in hands-on data collection with five speakers of Animere, a highly endangered language spoken in the Ghana-Togo border area, to create a first documentation of the language. Audio and video documentation of Animere will be archived at the established Archive of Language and Oral Resources of Africa (ALORA) housed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and at the University of Florida's Language Archive (TUFLA), a new language archive, in order to make it widely accessible to researchers and the public.
