Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa

Name: Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa
Brand: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Price: 130.99 EUR
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James Essegbey Brent Henderson Fiona Mc Laughlin(Herausgeber*in)

John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Erschienen am 22. Oktober 2015

VI, 317 Seiten

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Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa
Editorial page
Title page
LCC data
Table of contents
Introduction
References
Section 1. Language endangerment and documentation
Chapter 1. Unintended consequences of methodological and practical responses to language endangerment in Africa
1. Introduction
2. Scepticism
3. Constructive responses
4. Language documentation practices and their consequences
4.1 Orthography
4.2 Dangerous literacies
4.3 Standardisation
5. Recording, transcribing and editing
6. Concluding remarks
References
Chapter 2. Different cultures, different attitudes: But how different is "the African situation" really?
1. Some preliminary observations
2. The Tima documentation project: A case study
2.1 "We Tima are looking for a linguist"
2.2 Implementing Tima school materials
2.3 "We Tima speak a real language, not some dialect"
3. Some reasons for doubt
3.1 A brief look at the macro level: States and universities
3.2 Developing instructional materials
4. Common Ground
4.1 A comparison with the situation in First World countries
4.2 Language endangerment and the construction of ethnicity
5. A sentimental journey through the halls of language sciences
5.1 On so-called genetic and typological diversity
5.2 The reinvention of mixed languages
6. Some concluding remarks: Strategizing on methodologies
References
Chapter 3. Ideologies and typologies of language endangerment in Africa
1. Introduction
2. The present is in the past: Colonialisation and the creation of African languages
2.1 The invention of social categories
2.2 The creation of languages
2.3 The obsession with literacy
3. Africanist views on the vitality of African languages, contrasted with global endangerment crite
3.1 African languages: Doubly marginalised
3.2 Some unfounded assumptions on African languages and their patterns of interaction
3.3 Positioning African languages according to the UNESCO endangerment criteria
3.4 Locating African languages on Fishman's Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale
4. African language ecologies and the social factors nurturing them
4.1 Exogynous marriage patterns
4.2 Language acquisition in peer groups and age classes
4.3 Child fostering
4.4 Professional, ritual and crisis mobility and migration
4.5 Joking relationships and patronymic equivalences
4.6 Multilingualism and polylectality for hierarchical, ritual, and other purposes
4.7 Literacy practices relying on conventionalised exographia and multigraphia
5. Towards Africa-specific vitality and endangerment criteria
5.1 The existence of communities of practice and social networks for language socialization in a given language ecology
5.2 A home base providing the opportunities for maintaining and creating communities of practice and social networks in a given language ecology
5.3 Socioeconomic and political stability in the language ecology in question
5.4 Attitudes by speakers and non-speakers to the language ecology
5.5 The reification of languages in the ecology as "named languages" and their authentication as fully-fledged languages
6. Conclusion and outlook
References
Chapter 4. The role of colonial languages in language endangerment in Africa
1. Colonialism and language endangerment
2. Colonialism and language in Africa
2.1 Colonial attitudes towards language in Africa
2.2 Language policy and education in the colonial era
2.3 Post colonial importance of colonial languages
3. Language endangerment in Africa
3.1 Several surveys of language use in Africa
3.2 Conclusions from the surveys
4. Colonialism and language endangerment in Africa
References
Chapter 5. Can a language endanger itself? Reshaping repertoires in urban Senegal
1. Introduction
2. A short history of the ascent of Wolof
2.1 The pre-colonial landscape
2.2 European contact and the emergence of an urban way of speaking
2.3 Urban Wolof in the 20th and 21st centuries
2.4 Urban Wolof as urban belonging
3. (Re)conceptualizing language contact and multilingualism
3.1 Language contact: A Wolof perspective
3.2 Fractals: Capturing urban Wolof
4. Can a language endanger itself?
5. Conclusion
References
Chapter 6. "Is this my language?" Developing a writing system for an endangered-language community
1. Introduction
2. The problems
2.1 Socialization
2.2 Eliminating variation
2.3 Are there better alternatives to writing?
3. Developing an orthographic transcription
3.1 Initial orthography
3.2 The blowback and revision
4. Conclusion
References
Chapter 7. Development, language revitalization, and culture: The case of the Mayan languages of Gu
1. Introduction
2. The Mayan languages of Guatemala
3. Education, pedagogy, and language vitality
4. Development, poverty, and the "problem" of minority languages
5. Language vitality through healthcare: The Wuqu' Kawoq experience
5.1 Expanding the domains for Kaqchikel Maya speech
5.2 Neologisms in medicine: Reinvigorating the Kaqchikel medical lexicon
6. Development through language: Is there a linguist in the room?
7. Conclusions
References
Chapter 8. Some challenges of language documentation in African multilingual settings
1. Sociolinguistic situation
1.1 Leti
1.2 Bakola
2. Questioning the concept of language endangerment
3. The damaging effect of scientific constructedness and artefactualization
3.1 What language should we document: The linguist's or the community's language?
4. Approaching LD from a multilingualism perspective
5. Conclusion
References
Section 2. How to document particular domains or use documentary data to address specific issues
Chapter 9. Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork
1. Introduction
2. Folk definitions
3. Folk definitions of ideophones
4. Three strategies used in folk definitions
4.1 Everyday contexts of use
4.2 Depictive gestures
4.3 Sense relations
5. Discussion
Acknowledgements
References
Chapter 10. Out of context: Documenting languages in immigrant and refugee communities
1. Introduction
2. Documenting immigrant communities: Can we afford not to?
3. Should out of context documentation be avoided where possible?
4. Practical advice for out of 'context' documentation
4.1 Personal considerations
4.2 The urban environment
4.3 Technology
4.4 Young semi-speakers
4.5 Topics to target
5. Conclusions
References
Chapter 11. Archaeological inspiration and historical inference Directions for Edoid linguistic studies
1. Introduction
2. Background on Benin Kingdom
3. Grammatical resources coding foodstuffs
3.1 Morphological coding of plant produce
3.2 Phrasal classifiers
3.3 Kindred modifier phrase
3.4 Initial historical inferences
3.5 Reduced gender system
4. Gender system limitations
5. Discussion
References
Chapter 12. Describing endangered languages: Experiences from a PhD grammar project in Africa
1. Introduction
2. Experiences during the Yeyi grammar project in the framework of the research program at the Insitute of African Studies, University of Cologne
2.1 Writing a PhD thesis under the auspices of the ACACIA Special Research Center
2.2 The fieldwork schedule
2.3 The research program and the development of a grammatical description of Yeyi
2.4 Writing a grammar
3. Summing up
3.1 Data, language documentation, and the linguistic PhD project
3.2 The relationship between documentation and description
3.3 Documentary linguistic practices enable a new vantage point on language and grammatical analysis
4. Language documentation as a linguistic PhD project in the 21st century
5. Conclusion
References
Index
Language index

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