Language Documentation

Many languages of Indonesia are currently threatened to disappearing. Most of them are found in the provinces of Papua and Papua Barat, an area of only 1% of Indonesia’s population, but of about 60% of the country’s speech communities.
Endangered languages are defined as languages whose usage domains are presently undergoing a rapid reduction. This reduction manifests itself, inter alia, in the fact that the linguistic competence of speakers under twenty is extremely varied, ranging from highly fluent speakers who use the language every day to speakers with a primarily passive competence. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2009) records that more than 200 languages have become extinct during the last three generations, 538 are critically endangered, 502 severely endangered, 632 definitely endangered and 607 unsafe. However, slowly and increasingly a number of concerned linguists and cultural policymakers get governments, NGOs and centers of culture, science and education activated to respond constructively towards this alarming global trend.

What does “Language Documentation” mean and How does it work?

Data Orientation
The core of documentation consists of about 50-100 hours of annotated audio- and videotaped communicative events covering a broad range of interactional domains.
All the major types of communicative events which occur in a speech community are tabulated as completely as possible. Specimens for each of these types will be recorded, including specimens of everyday conversation, ritual speech, procedural texts on major activities, oral history, autobiographic knowledge as well as interactions with speakers from neighbouring speech communities.
In addition to this core of annotated recordings, documentation contains the following components:

• fieldwork details (team members, outline of general procedures, the methods used in gathering data, reliability and naturalness assessments)
• a preview of the contents and the scope of the documentation
• a description of the linguistic setting, including information on the genetic affiliation of the language
• a detailed discussion and explanation of the orthographic representation, interlinear glosses, and translation conventions, which in part will be presented in the format of a grammatical sketch
• major typological characteristic and a detailed account of the sociolinguistic setting (dialects, language contact)
• general information on the speech community (social organization, geography, history, etc.) including cross-references and links to more detailed work in the areas of anthropology, history and economics
• a lexical database
  

Multifunctionality
There is two aspects to the multifunctionality of the CELD documentations. Firstly, the content of the documentation has to be of interest and use to a number of different user groups. Secondly, the documents must be presented in a format that is accessible to different user groups to access them. For both features it is essential that the possible user groups have a say in the make-up and format of the documentation. All decision making, consultation and experimentation is carried out in a participatory fashion with community members.

As for uses by the speech community, experience of other projects indicates that there is often a great interest to generate a ‘real’ (printed) dictionary out of documentation, displayable on bookshelves and accessible at times and places without electricity and internet access. Local schools may want to produce a VCD which can easily be played on cheap VCD players now everywhere available in Indonesia.

In order to ensure that the recordings that make up the core of the documentation, are of use to all the different user groups they have to be annotated in various ways. In addition to the standard metadata description attached to every document, the standard annotation accompanying each document will include the following tiers:

• a transcription tier using the practical orthography agreed upon by the speech community (which is phonemic in representing all relevant contrasts)
• interlinear glosses in English and Indonesian for both lexemes and grams
• free translations into English and Indonesian
• comments on grammatical and cultural aspects of the document at hand which are not dealt with in the general introductory sections of the documentation

Accessibility/Archiving
The fully processed data are submitted to digital archives for endangered languages (first choices are the DoBeS archive in Nijmegen, Netherlands and PARADISEC in Melbourne, Australia). The community position on the issue of access always has to be determined and a considerable effort will be made to determine the need for restrictions on every single document as well as for the overall documentation with both the community at large as well as with the individual contributors.
In addition to submitting the fully processed data to a digital archive, the documentation will also be available in CELD in Manokwari and, as much as technically feasible, in an appropriate local government agency (e.g. the Dinas Kebudayaan of the region). Hardcopies of recordings as well as printouts of document files will be archived with the Council for Traditional Affairs of the Districts and a special version of (parts of) the documentation, which includes additional explanatory notes in Indonesian, will be made available to offices of the Kepala Desa (village chiefs) of the speech communities.