Language endangerment is caused by a number of factors, ranging from natural catastrophe, to disease, famine, war, and genocide. But the most common cause is language shift due to either overt repression or social, political or economic dominance of some kind, all of which lead to people giving up their ancestral or family language in favor of the dominant or majority population (Austin & Sallabank 2011; Grenoble 2011; Nettle & Romaine 2000). Broadly defined, language shift is thus generally the result of language contact, with unbalanced social dynamics leading to shift and loss. Since at least the early 1990s, linguists have been intensely concerned with documenting endangered languages, and in particular with documenting remaining fluent speakers while still possible. Special attention is generally given to elderly, highly proficient speakers, who are generally understood to speak varieties that are less affected by language contact and shift. This emphasis has come from a perhaps natural research bias that strives to document the linguistic system as fully as possible, while possible. The documentation of endangered languages has to date primarily focused on the creation of monolingual documentary corpora, and yet it is well-known that language endangerment is primarily due to shift in the face of language contact, and not due to catastrophic weather, natural disaster or war. We need to document language contact in process, to understand the linguistic processes that take place in the course of language shift, the kinds of language changes that occur, to provide insights into directionality and rates of change, and the roles of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors involved in language shift.
The emphasis on salvage linguistics has led to a tremendous amount of activity that documents, describes and analyzes a wide range of endangered languages. This research, although invaluable, may often fail to document the language ecology, the multilingual setting in which language shift occurs. In many situations, there is no clear separation of languages in terms of domains; rather, multilingual conversations, heavy language mixing and code switching are the norm. By focusing on documenting monolingualism, we miss the dynamics of actual language use on the ground. Moreover, we are missing an opportunity to document contact-induced change in process. Contact linguistics has focused on historical outcomes, on the end results of contact, reconstructing the historical processes that led to a specific language in a synchronic moment. The fact of global language endangerment, as sad as it is, also provides us with an opportunity to study change and shift in process, in a wide variety of situations, with different variables at play: contact between genealogically unrelated languages vs. related languages, typological differences, social and political differences and dimensions, varying language attitudes, and so on. Although current models of language endangerment largely predict a single end result (loss of the local language in favor of the dominant one), we do not have models that predict the steps along the way, with a few notable exceptions, such as in studies of Dyirbal or Light Warlpiri (e.g. Schmidt 1985; O'Shannessy 2016).
Doing this requires some retraining and refocusing of goals, and one step toward this is a workshop that enables active engagement of the linguistic community in the formulation of these goals. This workshop is aimed at advancing the field of language documentation by focusing on documenting multilingualism and language contact. It will have three basic parts: (1) consideration of the state of multilingualism in endangered language ecologies; (2) a focus on tools and methods for transcribing, annotating, analyzing and presenting multilingual corpora; and (3) the use of experimental methods in documenting and studying language contact in process. These topics are organized into two panels, with each also addressing issues of documentation methodologies, from a technical standpoint but also from a theoretical standpoint in terms of formulating the research questions. There is a designated discussant for each panel, whose job is to identify core issues.
Workshop goals
The workshop will result not only in new methodologies for documenting language contact, but will critically help to reshape the kinds of research questions that we presently ask.