Speakers and Documentation of Endangered Languages

Abstract

to mark the coming of the year 1992. This was to be the year of the celebrations of the so-called " 500 years of the discovery of America " which indigenous communities up and down the Americas were protesting. The panel discussion, which was quickly published in the Society's journal Language (March 1992), provoking subsequent debate in the journal (see the ensuing Ladefoged-Dorian exchange), was followed by a declaration of the LSA on endangered languages and the creation of the LSA Endangered Language Committee. I want to note the incredible sense of awe I feel, wishing Ken would be here today to realize the way I do how far we have moved, and so we could laugh at our incredible tension and his panic attack just before walking in the packed ballroom of the LSA; because we were walking in there to talk about endangered languages, and therefore in part about " politics " , a dirty word in U.S. academia. We were aware of raising a taboo subject and we owe it to him to have done it then. We were there to raise not only the issue of language endangerment, but also the intrinsic complex political nature of such situations, of the socio-political dimensions of fieldwork on those languages, and of our relations to the speakers of those languages. The December 1991 LSA panel was followed by a panel on endangered languages at the International Congress of Linguists in Quebec in 1992, and, a year later, by a working conference on endangered languages at Dartmouth. Three of us did this circuit coordinating our presentations as a whole: Mike Krauss would speak first, with his wake-up call introducing the statistics of 90 % of the languages of the world being endangered, speech that he even took to Congress for us (Krauss 1992, in Grenoble and Whaley 1997 and Matsumura 1998). Ken Hale would come second and try to impress on people what kind of human wealth was lost when a language was lost, giving examples from Australian or Amerindian languages of linguistic creativity (Hale 1992, in Grenoble and Whaley 1997), and I would come last, as the third of the " Three Stooges " (as I liked to call us), and talk about more mundane, and almost dirty, stuff: talk about ethics, and field methods, and about relations to the communities. (Craig 1992a). And here I am again, doing my part, but missing Ken's presence and honouring his memory.