From September 21 to September 25, the twelfth edition of the Language Documentation Summer School will take place at the University of Naples «L’Orientale». The school is organised by Andrea Di Manno, Paolo Milizia, Graziano Savà and Giancarlo Schirru, in collaboration with the Free University of Bolzano, the University of Tuscia and the association Ethnorêma. As in previous editions, the Summer School will benefit from the collaboration and participation of Professor Emeritus Peter K. Austin (SOAS University of London). This year’s edition will also feature the participation of Professor Emeritus Didier Demolin (Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) and Professor Ilaria Micheli (University of Trieste).

Over the five days of the Summer School, participants will be introduced to the methods, tools and practices of language documentation and revitalisation through a combination of theoretical lectures and practical fieldwork activities. Particular attention will be devoted to two languages, Nara (a Northern East Sudanic language spoken in Eritrea) and Amazigh (an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Morocco), which will serve as the basis for the practical sessions conducted together with native-speaker language consultants.

The School will be hosted at Palazzo del Mediterraneo (Via Nuova Marina, 59 – Naples). As in previous editions, the programme is structured around theoretical morning sessions and practical afternoon activities. The morning lectures will introduce participants to the main theoretical, methodological and technical aspects of language documentation and revitalisation, while the afternoon sessions will provide hands-on training through workshops, fieldwork with language consultants and collaborative project development.

The programme opens on Monday afternoon with introductory lectures on language documentation and revitalisation (Austin) and on the relationship between sociolinguistics and language documentation (Muru), followed by parallel practical workshops introducing the use of ELAN (Di Manno, Muru and Savà) and PRAAT (Schirru and Demolin).

The Tuesday morning sessions will introduce the two languages that will form the basis of the practical activities, Nara (Banti) and Amazigh, and will focus on methods of data elicitation and collection (Dal Negro) as well as audio and video recording techniques for language documentation (Savà).

On Wednesday morning, the programme will explore a range of advanced topics, including the documentation and description of the languages of the Ituri Forest Pygmies (Demolin), oral literature (Banti), metadata in language and cultural documentation (Vergari), and corpus management and archiving (Austin). The afternoon will feature the thematic session Topics in Amazigh Linguistics, with presentations by Mohamed Najari and Hamza Sellami (Mohammed V University in Rabat) on Amazigh phonology and computational approaches to morphological analysis.

Thursday morning will be devoted to the thematic session Project Presentations on Language Documentation, showcasing ongoing language documentation projects carried out by UniOr scholars in different parts of the world. Presentations will cover research conducted in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, North Kalimantan and Africa, with contributions by Antonia Soriente, Francesca R. Moro, Lidia F. Mazzitelli, Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Soung-U S. Kim and Luigi Sausa.

The afternoon sessions from Tuesday to Thursday will be devoted to practical fieldwork. Following an introduction to the fieldwork activities, participants will work directly with the Nara and Amazigh language consultants in parallel sessions, collecting, annotating and analysing linguistic data. Guided by the teaching staff, students will progressively develop small-scale language documentation projects, integrating the theoretical knowledge acquired during the morning lectures with hands-on experience using professional documentation tools and methodologies.

The final morning will address the ethical and applied dimensions of language documentation through lectures on ethics and researchers’ responsibilities towards language communities (Austin) and on the role of language documentation in development cooperation (Micheli). The School will conclude with the presentation of the group projects developed by the participants, followed by a final round table discussion.

Through this articulation in theoretical and practical sessions (both guided and autonomous), the school aims to provide participants with the fundamental tools of language documentation and to actively introduce them to fieldwork practices.