5. The Emergence of Documentary Linguistics
• Over the past 25 years has (re)emerged as a distinct subfield
• 1991 – Michael Krauss warns:
• “We must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down
in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance
of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated.”
• 1992 – UNESCO forms Endangered Languages Committee
• 1998 – Nikolaus Himmelmann argues for distinguishing language
description from documentation, which aims “to provide a
comprehensive record of the linguistic practices of a given speech
community”
6. The Emergence of Documentary Linguistics
• Funding
• 2000 – Volkswagen Foundation DOBES
• 2002 – Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP)
• 2005 – NSF Documenting Endangered Languages program (DEL)
• Infrastructure
• 1992 – Linguistic Society of America Committee on Endangered Languages
• 2001 – Open Language Archives Community
• 2003 – Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archiving Network
• Journals
• 2003 – Language Documentation and Description
• 2007 – Language Documentation & Conservation
10. Plant/disease syncretism
takaya ‘ti plant’ (Cordyline fruticosa).
• Leaves are tied onto valuable trees such as
candlenut, areca palm, and jackfruit to create
a protective spell which wards off theft of the
fruits or nuts of that tree.
• Transgressing this protection by taking the
fruits or nuts without permission will cause
the transgressor to suffer the takaya disease
(possibly cerebral malaria, per Chan 2016)
• plant = cause of disease