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75 years of Linguistics at SOAS
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Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory7-8 December 2007, SOAS, London |
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Phillip Cash CashUniversity of Arizona Documenting Language, Visualizing Culture:
Shooting Digital Video in Two Endangered Language Communities in Western
North America
Nez Perce and Sahaptin, two severely endangered sister languages in the southern Columbia Plateau of western North America (USA), are currently spoken by only 1% of the total indigenous population. The impact of language shift in these two speech communities is leading to the loss of dialectical and cultural diversity and ultimately to the loss of the languages themselves. Despite 70 years of modern language documentation and description, an audio-visual record depicting naturally occurring speaker interactions and communicative events for these two languages does not exist. A timely and urgent need exists to capture on digital video the naturally occurring speech of the few remaining fluent Nez Perce and Sahaptin speakers before their languages "fade away". This language documentation project, carried out in 2006-2007, addresses this urgent need. This paper summarizes my initial findings as well as reviewing my attempts to create a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices from these two speech communities using digital video technologies. It also examines the need to develop an expanded research paradigm where collecting audio-visual data is an essential component to any language documentation project. About Phillip Cash Cash Phillip Cash Cash was born and raised on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon (USA) and is an indigenous Weyíiletpuu (Cayuse) and Nuumíipuu (Nez Perce) person. He is presently a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona, Tucson (USA). In 2005, he was a recipient of a Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) fellowship from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment of the Humanities. This DEL fellowship enabled him to complete a year of language documentation fieldwork focusing on Nez Perce and Sahaptin in five reservation communities in the southern Columbia Plateau of western North America. Recently, he received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation & American Council for Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2007-2008. Webpage: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ Listserv: Indigenous Languages and Technology Listserv http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html
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