Dr. Nick Williams: Why documenting languages (still) matters and how to do it скачать в хорошем качестве

Dr. Nick Williams: Why documenting languages (still) matters and how to do it

A crisis of endangerment continues to threaten the majority of the world's ~7,000 languages spoken today, some 30 years after Krauss's (1992) call to arms. In fact, according to Hammarström et al. (2023), just 36% of the world's languages can be considered "not endangered." One response to this crisis has been to document as many languages as possible, as comprehensively as possible. Other responses focus on language rights and raising awareness, for example the UN General Assembly's proclamation of the period of 2022-2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. In this talk, I review the development of language documentation over the past 30 years, demonstrating its value to both linguistics and language communities and making the case for continued support for this important work. Since the value of documentation depends on its methodology and scope, I also propose a model for doing documentation that is collaborative, team-based, interactional and moves away from individual 'languages' toward documentation of the “total linguistic fact” (Silverstein 1985:220). Bio: Dr. Williams is a linguist specializing in language documentation, conversation analysis, and linguistic anthropology. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2016. Since then, he has taught linguistics at CUNY, Dartmouth, and the University of Potsdam (Germany) and has continued working on the documentation of several languages in Brazil and Indonesia. Dr. Williams's research takes and usage-based and interactional approach to grammatical description. In particular, he has been interested in topics such as deixis, evidentiality, and hard-to-describe particles like 'mm'. He is currently an Instructional Specialist in the Department of Linguistics at Montclair State University.