Endangered Languages

Abstract:
Moldova is an ex-Soviet country in the southestern part of Europe
between Romania and Ukraine. Historical Moldovia or ‘Kara Bogdan’ in the Ottoman terminology, became a vassal state of the Ottoman mpire in 16th century. As a result of Turkish-Russian War 18061812, ast Moldovia was annexed to Russia and re-named Bessarabia
by the Russian rulers. Moldovans and Romanians share same language and a common cultural heritage. This ‘tiny’ and 'poor' country choosed ts path towards the European Union and Romania against opposition of Pro-Russian circles and Transnistrian separatist movement
supported by the Russia Federation. In this paper contemporary Moldova’s recent social and political stuation will be examined briefly at the historical background.

Keywords: Moldovia, Romania, Bogdan, Bessarabia, Transnistria, Gagauz.


Özet
Moldova, Avrupa’nın güneydoğusunda, Romanya ile Ukrayna arasındaki
bir eski Sovyet ülkesidir. Tarihi Moldova veya Osmanlı kullanımındaki
‘Kara Boğdan’ 16. yy’da Osmanlı devletinin bağlısı bir devlet
haline gelmiştir. 1806-1812 Osmanlı-Rus Savaşı’nın sonunda Doğu
Moldova Rusya’ya ilhak olunmuş ve Rus yöneticilerce Bessarabya diyeadlandırılmıştır. Moldovalılar ve Romenler aynı dile ve ortak bir
kültürel mirasa sahiptirler. Bu küçük ve fakir ülke, Rus lehtarı çevrelerin ve Rusya Federasyonu’nca desteklenen Trans-Dnyester ayrılıkçı hareketinin rağmına Avrupa Birliği ve Romanya yolunu seçmiştir. Bu akale çağdaş Moldova’nın toplumsal ve siyasi durumunu tarihi zeminiyle birlikte kısaca incelemektedir.

Anahtar Kelimeler:
Moldova, Romanya, Bogdan, Bessarabya, Trans Dnyester, Gagauzlar.

This article discusses language documentation for Trinidadian French Creole (Patois), an endangered heritage language, especially through textual support, from c.1805 to texts gathered during the present day. 

From the Introduction (xvi to xvii):

Jo-Anne Ferreira discusses the cultural heritage and
revitalization issues of Trinidadian French Creole (TFC) or Patois. She examines and establishes a very useful update of a minority and marginalized, even endangered language in the Caribbean that, while thriving elsewhere, is very limited today in Trinidad. The chapter raises pertinent questions about language planning, the effects and benefits of internet technology on language development and maintenance, as well as the sociocultural importance of TFC. The author’s purpose is twofold: to make TFC literary culture available to a series of wider audiences and to formally support informal language preservation efforts currently under way.

pp. 111-125

Endangered languages are linguistic varieties spoken by relatively few people (perhaps most of them elderly), and/or in relatively few communities (perhaps even in a single, relatively small one), and/or on relatively infrequent occasions. They are languages whose future as anyone's primary (or even secondary) medium of day-today communication seems seriously in doubt—languages that in former times would have been identified as "moribund" or "dying." Though the term "endangered languages" is of recent (post-1980) origin, research on languages like these has been carried on for a considerable period of time. Indeed, the whole tradition of "Americanist" anthropology has unfolded at least since the time of Franz Boas under the assumption that the linguistic varieties and cultural practices of central interest and concern (usually, those of Native American peoples) are in the process of disappearing once and for all, and need urgently to be documented for posterity (a familiar notion of "salvage" ethnography or linguistics). Leonard Bloomfield commented in 1927 on the special problems of doing fieldwork in rapidly contracting language communities; but it was Morris Swadesh who, in 1948, applied the term "obsolescent" to these kinds of linguistic varieties, and this designation served the purposes of most researchers until the late 1980s. By the mid-1970s a number of studies had begun to appear in the scholarly literature under a variety of rubrics, including "language obsolescence," language "replacement" and "shift," "de-acquisition," and sometimes, simply , "language death." These are not all synonyms, of course: "de-acquisi-tion" suggests a focus on native-speaker competence (and the wide range of fluencies that can be observed), while "language shift" can occur whenever the members of a local speech-community begin pervasively to abandon the use of one linguistic variety in favor of another, regardless of whether or not the language being abandoned continues to be spoken elsewhere.

This is a short paper I wrote after a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in 2005 for a class on Endangered Languages taught by Suzanne Romaine.  I am posting it now because I am scheduled to give a talk on the artwork of Jaume Plensa at the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis in October, 2018 and remembered this discussion of art and language that I wrote as a student.

A survey of the multiple participants involved in linguistic planning of the Berber language, both in North Africa and in the diaspora: speakers, cultural associations, notable individuals, States, universities, institutions (HCA in Algeria, IRCAM in Morocco), schools, parties and movements, opposants, migrants abroad and second generations, foreign institutions (e.g. Inalco, France), foreign States, Berber associations in the world (e.g. CMA), standard-setting organizations (e.g. Unicode).

L'armenien occidental est la langue parlee par les Armeniens en diaspora, et est reconnu comme une des langues de France non territoriales par le Ministere de la culture. Elle a ete classee langue en danger par l'Unesco en fevrier 2010. Ce rapport fait suite a une recherche visant a faire un etat des lieux de l'armenien occidental en France, de la pratique de la langue, et des representations associees a l'armenien occidental, son present et son devenir. Il s'appuie sur l'exploitation statistique d'une enquete quantitative en ligne de 29 questions qui a recueilli 1368 reponses entre le 15/01/2014 et le 20/03/2014, ainsi que sur des donnees qualitatives extraites d'une part des commentaires libres autorises par l'enquete, d'autre part de recueil de corpus spontanes d'armenien occidental parle par des locuteurs de profils varies en France.

To pay tribute to the contributions made by Wallace Lambert in the field of immersion education at an international level, this article highlights initiatives undertaken to revitalize regional languages through immersion education in France. Based on the immersion model, school-based programs have been implemented in France to teach regional languages such as Occitan, Basque, and Catalan in the south, Corsican on the island of Corsica, Breton in the northwest, and German in the eastern regions of Alsace and Moselle. This article points out many differences across these regional contexts, but concludes by emphasizing common issues that need to be addressed across the different regions with respect to pedagogical practices and professional development.

O presente artigo pretende promover reflexão acerca de características do Português Brasileiro em uso pela população indígena Karipuna que vive em terras indígenas às proximidades do município de Oiapoque-AP, Brasil. Os Karipuna formam um povo heterogêneo que ao longo de muitas décadas vem mantendo relação com diversos povos brasileiros indígenas e não indígenas, bem como com estrangeiros que vivem do outro lado da fronteira franco-brasileira. O português falado pelo povo Karipuna, em alguns casos, é visto como um dialeto errado por algumas pessoas, numa verdadeira expressão do preconceito linguístico. Ao apresentarmos algumas perguntas relacionadas aos dados, problematizamos a ocorrência, em pleno século XXI, de preconceito linguístico. Ao final, embora não seja nosso objetivo central, argumentamos em favor de que a escola também tem responsabilidade sobre a realidade e comportamentos linguísticos vistos na sociedade brasileira.

The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.

We present advances in the development of a FST-based morphological analyzer and generator for Skolt Sami. Like other minority Uralic languages, Skolt Sami exhibits a rich morphology, on the one hand, and there is little golden standard material for it, on the other. This makes NLP approaches for its study difficult without a solid morphological analysis. The language is severely endangered and the work presented in this paper forms a part of a greater whole in its revitalization efforts. Furthermore, we intersperse our description with facilitation and description practices not well documented in the infrastructure. Currently, the analyzer covers over 30,000 Skolt Sami words in 148 inflectional paradigms and over 12 derivational forms.

[From the introduction].
The Reb gong Vale  is a densely populated high-altitude agricultural oasis that runs north-to-south for approximately twenty kilometers through the northeastern Tibetan Plateau, surrounded by barren pastoral hills that rise to rocky snow-capped peaks. The majority of the vale's residents self-identify as Tibetan, but this population contains considerable diversity along religious, sectarian, and linguistic lines. We explore how the linguistic diversity of the region might have been maintained despite communities sharing a common identity, being engaged in inter-communal ritual networks, sharing common trade and pilgrimage sites, and living in close proximity in the absence of geographical barriers. Given their contiguity and interconnectedness, what enabled certain communities to remain distinct from nearby populations? Under such circumstances, how did relatively small communities maintain distinct languages? What prevented them from being linguistically assimilated into the Tibetan population?

Il berbero e una lingua che difficilmente si puo definire “minore”, tanto in termini assoluti (15-20 milioni di parlanti) quanto in termini relativi (probabilmente in Marocco i berberofoni sono superiori al numero degli arabofoni). E’ tuttavia indubbio che nei paesi in cui viene parlata la lingua berbera si trova in un evidente stato di inferiorita, che risale a due tipi di cause: 1Una pesante censura di tipo ideologico da parte delle autorita statali (solo da poco si cominciano ad osservare parziali aperture e timidi “riconoscimenti”) 2Il ruolo oggettivamente “secondario” che essa ha come lingua scritta fin dai tempi di Massinissa, il che in qualche caso non appare imputabile a imposizione esterna ma sembra discendere da scelte volontarie dei locutori (quest’ultimo tipo di atteggiamento, pero, appare in netto regresso, soprattutto negli ultimi decenni). La enorme dispersione geografica (si pensi che il berbero e la lingua di un intero subcontinente, l’Africa mediterranea e saharian...

In this paper, presented at the XLVI International Congress of the Societa' Italiana di Linguistica (Siena, 27-29 September 2012), I try to summarize my ongoing research on the endangered multilingualism practices in Lower Fungom, a linguistically highly diverse micro-area located at the northern edges of the Cameroonian Grassfields. Unlike most of the past and current research on Africa's "complicated" multilingualism, my focus is non-urban settings (only few scholars, among whom Bruce Connell and Friederike Luepke, are doing similar research). This orientation allows me to encounter traditional (i.e. most likely pre-colonial) sociocultural dynamics involving the development of multilingual competences. In particular, I stress that the apparent, yet so far neglected, connection existing between the individual's tendency towards maximization of the number of potential networks of solidarity (an ethnographic fact) and the use of language as the most powerful tool for symbolizing affiliation in one or the other network, could in fact be seen as being rooted in beliefs of magic. I also mention the possibility that data from Lower Fungom and similar contexts would stimulate re-consideration of the essentialist-indexical dichotomy in language ideology studies (though this part has not been developed in this talk).

Academic Reference:

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad & Monaghan, Paul (2012). "Revival linguistics and the new media: Talknology in the service of the Barngarla language reclamation", pp. 119-126 of Foundation for Endangered Languages XVI Conference: Language Endangerment in the 21st Century:Globalisation, Technology & New Media. Auckland, New Zealand.

------------------------------


Revival Linguistics and the New Media:
Talknology in the service of the Barngarla Language Reclamation


Ghil‘ad Zuckermann

Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[[email protected]]


Paul Monaghan

Mobile Language Team
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[[email protected]]


Abstract

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (see Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

The study: The Barngarla language (spelled Parnkalla by Schürmann 1844) is a no-longer spoken Thura-Yura Pama-Nyungan Aboriginal language of the Lakes Cultural Region of South Australia. Most recently Zuckermann, Monaghan and the Barngarla community have launched a reclamation of this sleeping beauty in three major rural/urban centres on the Eyre Peninsula, namely Port Lincoln, Whyalla, and Port Augusta. The presence of three Barngarla populations several hours drive apart presents the revival linguist with a need for a sophisticated reclamation involving ‘talknological’ innovations, such as online chatting, newsgroups, photo and resource sharing through a Barngarla wiki. This paper also examines the tensions accompanying the creation of a Barngarla ‘community of practice’ (cf. Wenger 1998) in a post-traditional Aboriginal context. In important ways, the new talknology poses a direct challenge to existing authority structures relating to the everyday management of knowledge, collaboration and participation. We predict that how the broader Barngarla community negotiates these issues will have an important bearing on the ultimate results of the reclamation project.




Revival Linguistics

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

Revival Linguistics complements the established field of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep. Revival Linguistics ought to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): Grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation, i.e. in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann’s 1844 spelling of the Barngarla word nunyara ‘recovery’, which ignores the English environment, thus resulting in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara.

Closely related to contact linguistics, Revival Linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics, e.g. by weakening the Family Tree model, which implies that a language ought to have only one parent. Assisting Aboriginal communities in a realistic, non-purisitic way, without selling them myths, Revival Linguistics promotes efficiency and efficacy in language reclamation.

Certainly Australia has been made the ‘Unlucky Country’ through the historical processes of linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating). These twin forces were in operation from the early colonial period. In her detailed study of the role missionary language practices in the early years of the South Australian colony, Scrimgeour quotes the following colonial language ideology: ‘Mr Forster afterwards adverted to the present mode of teaching the children in their own language. He, with all respect to the Missionaries, would say, on several grounds, that this was wrong. The natives would be sooner civilized if their language was extinct. The children taught would afterwards mix only with whites, where their own language would be of no use – the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.  He gave the Missionaries full credit for their talents and zeal, but he thought it would be better to teach the children in English’ (from Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843; Scrimgeour, 2007: 116, italics added).

In the case of glottophagy, Governor George Grey noted: ‘The merchant in London who lays on a vessel for a certain port, regards the affair as a mere mercantile speculation, but could he trace out the results he effects in their remotest ramifications, he would stand astonished at the changes he produces.  With the wizard wand of commerce, he touches a lone and trackless forest, and at his bidding, cities arise, and the hum and dust of trade collect – away are swept ancient races; antique laws and customs moulder into oblivion.  The strong-holds of murder and superstition are cleansed, and the Gospel is preached amongst ignorant and savage men. The ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard around’ (Grey 1841: 200-201, italics added). Grey was a strong supporter of Aboriginal languages, encouraging Schürmann’s work documenting the Adelaide language (Kaurna) and Barngarla at Port Lincoln (see below).

With globalization, homogenization and Coca-colonization there will be more and more groups all over the world added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival: for example, social justice, diversity and employability, respectively.

Zuckermann (2012) has enthusiastically called for Native Tongue Title and linguistic human rights, suggesting that the Australian government ought to compensate Indigenous people not only for the loss of land but equally importantly for the loss of language. Zuckermann has suggested to the Australian government to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages.

Furthermore, it is predicted that in the future the very insights offered by Revival Linguistics will themselves become part of Indigenous Intellectual Property, when Slovenes and Estonians come to Australia and New Zealand to ask Aboriginal Australians and Maori to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

There is an urgent need to produce perspicacious LINGUISTIC and socio-linguistic insights relevant to language reclamation. Otherwise, linguists or language workers would not be able to offer, if asked by Indigenous people, efficient and efficacious advice. There are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and First Nations leaders to work more efficiently; for example, to focus more on basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than on sounds and word order – see Zuckermann (2009: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf.

Revival linguistics would assist revivalists to be more realistic and to abandon discouraging slogans such as "Give us authenticity or give us death!" The following are among the basic principles that the revival linguist encourages in Aboriginal communities:

i. If your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive!
ii. If you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue; and
iii. If your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need.

One day we may invent devices to “inject” a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists' and documenters' mother tongues and, of course, the target language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

The Study


Figure 1: Map of Traditional Aboriginal Country after Norman Tindale (adapted from Hercus 1999)

The Barngarla language reclamation project has arisen through partnerships between the University of Adelaide (Linguistics and the Mobile Language Team) and the Barngarla people. Although still in its infancy, consultations began in September 2011, a number of very significant steps have been made towards reclaiming this ‘sleeping beauty’. Without doubt, the key challenge has been to develop a strategy for the reclamation of the language simultaneously and without favour in three major regional centres. In ways that will be elaborated below, this multi-sited, regional or peripheral reclamation makes demands that are very different to those often found in metropolitan reclamation contexts (e.g. Kaurna, cf. Amery...

This paper proposes the enactment of an ex gratia compensation scheme for loss of Indigenous languages in Australia. Although some Australian states have enacted ex gratia compensation schemes for the victims of the Stolen Generation policies, the victims of ‘linguicide’ (language killing) are largely overlooked by the Australian Government. Existing grant schemes to support Aboriginal languages are inadequate, and they should be complemented with compensation schemes, which are based on a claim of right. The proposed compensation scheme for the loss of Aboriginal languages should support the effort to reclaim and revive the lost languages. We first outline the history of linguicide during colonisation in Australia. We then put a case for reviving lost Aboriginal languages by highlighting the benefits of language revival. After evaluating the limits of existing Australian law in supporting the language revival efforts, this paper proposes a statute-based ex gratia compensation scheme, which can be colloquially called ‘Native Tongue Title’.

This contribution deals with the linguistic expression of possession in Kukama-Kukamiria and examines potential correlations between possessive semantic relations (Heine 1997, Stassen 2009, Barker 2011) and construction types. Kukama-Kukamiria, a language spoken in the Amazon of Peru, does not have lexical verbs such as ‘have’, ‘belong,’ or a copula to predicate possession. Although the language does not have a dedicated possessive construction, possession can be inferred from several constructions, four of which are the focus of this paper.

Die wilmesaurische Sprache ist seit über hundert Jahren von verschiedenen Forschern untersucht und beschrieben worden. Unabhängig davon, ob sie in ihren Texten als Dialekt, Ethnolekt, Mundart oder eigenständige Sprache gilt, bewundert man die lange Existenz des Wilmesaurischen und das Streben der Wilmesauer nach der Erhaltung ihrer Identität.
Obwohl das Wilmesaurische nur in einer kleinen Stadt gesprochen wird, hat es mehrere Varietäten entwickelt. Regional teilt sich Wilmesau in zwei Dialekte: den Zentral-Westlichen, der fast wie die Standardsprache klingt und den Östlichen Dialekt, in dem ein großer Einfluss des Deutschen zu beobachten ist. Der Östliche Dialekt wird vermutlich in den nächsten Jahren aussterben. Abhängig von den individuellen Lebensgeschichten der Sprecher entwickelten sich für jeden Idiolekte, die sich manchmal sehr unterscheiden, indem sie vom Polnischen oder vom Deutschen beeinflusst werden. Mit ähnlicher Situation haben wir in der Literatur zu tun: Der Einfluss des Deutschen ist in den Gedichten von Gara sichtbar, weil er in seiner Jugend eine deutschsprachige Schule besuchte. Der Einfluss von verschiedenen Sprachen in Biesiks Gedichten ist auf seine Reisen und das Leben in Wien und Triest zurückzuführen. Die heutigen Texte basieren fast nur auf dem wilmesaurischen Wortschatz, sie verzichten meistens auf direkte Entlehnungen, aber einige Lehnwörter sind dort doch zu finden.
Da die Sprache wegen der Verfolgungen schon fast ausgestorben war, hat man ein Revitalisierungsprogramm angefangen. Daran nehmen nicht nur lokale Aktivisten von der Gesellschaft „Wilamowianie“, aber auch in großer Masse Wissenschaftler von Universitäten aus verschiedenen Ländern teil, besonders engagiert ist die Fakultät Artes Liberales der Universität Warschau.
33
Die Revitalisierung besteht aus Dokumentation, Sprachlehre und Änderung der lokalen Sprachideologien. Obwohl die Dokumentation ein wichtiger Pfeiler der Wiederbelebung einer Sprache ist, hat die revitalisierte Sprache nicht mehr die Eigenschaften wie vor diesem Prozess. Einige Varietäten erlöschen, wie zum Beispiel die wilmesaurische Frauensprache oder der Ostdialekt, und andere entstehen, wie die Sprache der Hochschulen oder die Internetsprache. Die Jugend baut aufgrund lokaler Sprachideologien auch neue Lekte, die Fremdwörter aus dem Englischen oder aus dem Polnischen enthalten. Wenn die Revitalisierung weitergeführt werden wird, werden mehrere Sprachvarietäten entwickelt.
Das, dass die neuen Lekte die alten ersetzen, ist natürlich und wäre vermutlich auch passiert, wenn das Wilmesaurische 1945 nicht verboten und die intergenerationelle Überlieferung nicht zerstört gewesen wäre. Deswegen trotz verschiedener Beurteilung der Sprachrevitalisierung und der Angewandten Anthropologie, kann man nicht bestreiten, dass infolge dieses Prozesses neue, nicht künstlich von Wissenschaftlern geschaffene, sondern lebendige Sprachformen entstehen.
Die Sprachrevitalisierung in Wilmesau hat erst vor ein Paar Jahren angefangen. Diese Arbeit berichtet über die Sprachsituation in der Stadt im Jahre 2015. Um weiter, mehr präzise Schlussfolgerungen zu ziehen, sollte man das Wilmesaurische in nächsten Jahren beobachten, besonders die Jugendsprache und die Sprache der Wissenschaftler, die wilmesaurisch schreiben, weil in diesen zwei Bereichen die größte Sprachentwicklung und damit die größte Hoffnung für die Zukunft dieser Mikrosprache zu erwarten ist.

The optimal language for literature and educational materials is not the same for all Zay areas. The data gathered during the current study points to Zay as optimal for the islands on Lake Ziway and Oromo as optimal for the lakeshores. However, the Zay people living on the islands would probably be well served by Amharic literature and educational materials until most of them immigrate to the shore or the Oromo educational system causes a shift in preference to Oromo. Zay’s case is one of an endangered language that could prove to be a development success story, but only if the level of motivation for a language development project is high enough to initiate and sustain the effort.

CHITKA is a trilingual literary magazine being published in Pahari, Urdu and English languages by International Pahari Literacy Society (Alami Pahari Adabi Sangat (APAS). The issue uploaded here is the special millennium edition, published in 2004. APAS is an international organization dedicated to preservation and restoration of endangered Pahari language and culture of Jammu Kashmir. I participated in its publication as chief editor and newly invented Shah Mukhi script of the Pahari language as approved by APAS was adopted

In recent years, building web-accessible dictionaries has become a new way of organizing and publishing data from linguistic fieldwork on indigenous languages. This paper provides an overview of one such online dictionary. The language we worked on was Southeastern Pomo, an endangered native American language which was historically spoken in the area of Clear Lake, California. The structure of the dictionary and the files that are needed to construct it are introduced in detail. We also demonstrate three types of searches that are made available on the dictionary website.

"Carter's music poses struggles of opposition, for instance in timbre (Double Concerto), space (String Quartet No. 3) or pulse (String Quartet No. 5). His preference for the all-interval tetrachords, 4–Z15 [0, 1, 4, 6] and 4–Z29 [0, 1, 3, 7], is also well known. From these facets of Carter's music, I develop a narrative interpretation of his Petrarch sonnet–inspired solo flute piece, Scrivo in Vento (1991). Specifically, I forge narrative pathways by imagining the two tetrachords as active agents opposed in competition. Previous Scrivo analyses (Capuzzo 2002; Childs 2006) stress continuity by revealing Q-transforms and common-note voice leading between the tetrachords. While acknowledging such features, my analysis emphasises oppositional struggle by tracing the tetrachords as separate entities which cooperate and conflict as they manoeuvre to outdo each other.

The analysis advances three theses: (1) it guides listening to and reading Scrivo in a way which resonates with Carter's concern for the aesthetics of oppositional struggle, his choice of a sonnet as inspiration and his affinity for all-interval tetrachords; (2) it shows that music-analytical detail can be organised into dramatic narratives by (a) projecting dramatic roles onto categories asserted by a formal theory and (b) treating the formal theory's relations metaphorically as actions performed by each role as the musical work unfolds; and (3) it shows how detailed pc-set analysis can support a Heraclitean view of music: a flux of opposing forces seeking and resisting unity."

Up to this day, the Ossetian diaspora that had left their homeland in the second half of the 19th century managed to keep their language alive. A part of this diaspora is settled in today’s Turkey and passed their language orally since they have no writing tradition. Ossetic speakers are usually bilingual; speakers of Anatolian Ossetic have been influenced by Turkish whereas Ossetic speakers from the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania have been influenced by Russian. This influence includes e.g. borrowed words, mainly those designating inventions of the past century. Except for borrowed words, there are also slight grammatical differences between Anatolian Ossetic and Caucasian Ossetic. In spite of the differences, Ossetian speakers from these two regions can still communicate with each other and the varieties are mutually intelligible. This paper will discuss my observations of the differences and similarities of Anatolian and Caucasian Ossetic. Further, it will provide information about the less studied Anatolian Ossetic varieties.

With the topic of language endangerment becoming more pronounced in the recent years, there is an on-going debate of whether anything should be done and if so, by whom? There have been some scholars who call for action from both descriptive linguists and applied linguists to be more actively involved in the work of saving these endangered languages. The aim of this paper is to describe the events of Language Travels in Malacca, a programme initiated by the Free Linguistics Conference (FLC) group, and how Language Travels was able to empower the Malaccan Portuguese community through tourism and encourage language maintenance efforts of their language known as Papia Kristang, or Malaccan Portuguese Creole (MPC), which is severely endangered. As this is a case study approach, data was collected by the Linguistics and Language Faculty of the University of Malaya through a variety of methods including interviews, survey questionnaire, video recordings, pictures and fieldnotes. This project has met the ethics requirement for the University of Malaya.

From the analysis of data, four main themes emerge: (1) Language Travels brought economic benefit to the community through channelling the expenses of the programme straight back to the community; (2) Language Travels improved the prestige of the language in the eyes of the community through participation from a wide audience and the intentional learning and performance of the language; (3) Language Travels helped to build self-confidence in early language learners in the community through their participation in language teaching activities; (4) the success of Language Travels can be measured through parameters that can be short-term and/or long-term such as participant engagement, community feedback, programme continuity and increased use in the language.

Language Travels was conducted as a pilot project to explore the use of tourism as a means of prestige planning to empower communities of endangered languages to value and keep using their language. The emerging themes from the data point to the success of Language Travels in creating a language-based micro-economy surrounding the use of MPC in a tourism setting. As such, Language Travels can provide a model to adapt from for future projects seeking to achieve similar goals.