Module 12: Language Documentation

The Linguist’s Perspective

Evelyn Wicklund

            In this class we read about linguists and what their work has showed us. We’ve learned how their hard research has discovered large sets of organized information, saved languages from becoming lost forever, and it has even given us information on how the America’s became populated. Through linguist’s work people are able to translate languages and understand different cultures. Vast amounts of information can be stored in a language, and without linguist these niches may have never been discovered by people who don’t speak that language. However, how does this affect the linguists themselves? Do they face problems when doing their work? Do linguists have to change how they view the world in order to understand a different language?

            In the beginning it turns out many linguists didn’t intend to become a linguist. Jane Hill states that “by historical accident I am a sociolinguist” and Ofelia Zepeda started out as a sociology major but changed it to linguistics after learning about her own language, Tohono O’odham (Zepeda). Zepeda started out as a teacher during her graduate years, but had to learn the hard way about teaching a language to people who speak that language. When she taught Tohono O’odham to people who didn’t speak it very well, it was easy. However, when she started teaching her language on the reservation, she got lots of negative feedback, one example of this is something one of her friends told her:

You know what [Mr. So and So] is saying about your book? He is saying that many of the things you wrote about how the language works [are] all wrong. He is telling everyone [with emphasis on “everyone”] you just made up some things about the language and the white people believed you and let you publish it. He says you probably don’t really speak the language anyway. (Zepeda)

There are many problems linguist face, especially from the cultural barrier. One account a linguist had stated, “However, upon arrival in Indian Country, academic linguists must learn to become fluent in the dynamics of Indian communities. If they do not, they will fail the test presented by that community, where failure is often accompanied by expulsion.” (Bigler). All linguists will face this struggle, whether they’re a linguist in their own language or not because of all the different dialects. Every person experiences their own culture differently too, it may be universal to a group of friends that ‘American culture’ is fast food and burgers, whereas to do a different group of friends that same American culture is actually capitalism and nationalism.

Once a linguist can get past the cultural barriers, they must start selecting individuals who will have the patience and fluency required for breaking down the grammar and syntax of another language. Many American Indian languages for example, do not have that many speakers left. This creates a small data set. Small data sets are not good when trying to create universal grammatical rules and even just learning their vocabulary (Ellis). If you take American English and compare it to the English spoken in England, biscuits, chips, and torch (just to name a few) mean very different things to each speaker. Still looking at this example, take the words “favorite” and “favourite” for example, in American English one is correct, and in England English the other spelling is correct. This makes it difficult to create grammar rules, because it is different, so when you have a small data set you may not even notice that there are differences in grammar between dialects (Bigler). An even worse possibility is that the small data set has multiple different dialects being put together and not knowing they’re different at all (Bigler). Small data sets can also favor one aspect of a language over another without anyone being aware. “De Bot undertook an analysis of his informants in terms of their gender and regional location, noting that his sample weighted in favour of males” (Ellis). If he was looking into Tohono O’odham for example, he would have missed the fact that women speakers of that language talk differently than the men. Being a linguist is not easy, they face many problems and only a select few have been mentioned here. Being an outsider is not easy, and many linguists studying dying languages have even more problems than being allowed into the new culture.

References

Bigler, Gregory, and Mary S. Linn. "Acting Responsibly: Linguists in American Indian Communities." Practicing Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 2, 1999, pp. 34-38, doi:10.17730/praa.21.2.x2w7xgp824123t24.

Ellis, Rod, and Ebooks Corporation. Becoming and being an Applied Linguist: The Life Histories of some Applied Linguists. vol. 101;101.;, , 2016.

Zepeda, Ofelia, and Jane Hill. "Collaborative Sociolinguistic Research among the Tohono O’odham." Oral Tradition, vol. 13, no. 1, 1998, pp. 130-156.