Participatory Research in Linguistics (PRL) is a collaborative approach in which linguists and mother-tongue speakers work together to develop a readable writing system for community use. This collaboration is fostered through a series of tailored workshops that lay a foundation for orthography decisions and ongoing language development. 

PRL workshops begin by having native speakers use an orthography they already know to write down nouns and verbs in their mother-tongue. Semantic domains and culturally relevant pictures are used as prompts to help generate a large corpus of data, preferably 1,000 words. Each word is transcribed on a small piece of paper along with a gloss. 

The group then proceeds to systematically examine each vowel and consonant that occurs in the transcriptions. Words are first sorted by syllable structure, then further sorted according to a particular letter. The resulting pile is read aloud, one word at a time, by a native speaker. The rest of the participants listen closely to determine whether or not the letter being researched consistently corresponds to a single sound. If the letter is found to represent 2 (or more) contrastive sounds, the words are further sorted so that the pertinent letter in each pile represents only a single sound (i.e. phoneme). Orthography options are discussed, as needed, for each phoneme discovered. 

A similar process is followed for tone: words with the same syllable structure are read aloud and sorted by tone melody. If the sorting process reveals that the functional load of lexical tone is high, orthography options are presented for differentiating contrastive tones. 

Later stages of the workshop evaluate noun and verb phrases, grammatical tone, and word boundaries to establish other rules necessary for a working orthography. A typical PRL workshop will result in a tentative orthography guide, a small lexicon, and community empowerment for further language development. 

PRL workshops are used to facilitate the development of writing systems that are...

• Adequate for all relevant contrasts in the language

• Intuitive for native speakers to learn and to use

• Acceptable to the language community

PRL workshops are adaptable in structure and scope.

They may be designed for... 

• The initial stage of analysis  

• Revision of an orthography already in use  

• Further study on a particular topic, such as vowel harmony or tone 

• Analysis of a single language 

• Analysis of several related languages simultaneously