Newman

This page is for our notes/discussion on We Has Seen The Enemy And It Is Us: The Endangered Language Issue As A Hopeless cause

Why it is important per Newman to document endangered languages:

- "Knowledge of diverse languages with different different structures that belong to different language families helps to truly gain an understanding of universal grammar (the nature of human language capacity)." - "Understanding of linguistic typology and the ability to accurately classify languages and reconstruct proto-forms depends on the availability of a wide array of languages."

Main reasons in the article for why it is a lost cause to fix the Endangered Language Issue:

-Linguists no longer want to participate in field-work, instead they choose to base their dissertations on secondary resources

-Linguists who do participate in field-work end up becoming a type of social worker for the endangered language's community and spend more time and resources in bettering the community instead of doing straight documentation of the language

- Language preservation/revival projects obtain more money in funding than just straight documentation would give

- There are serious political issues that can come up in trying to document a smaller endangered language in a country that is only wanting to promote the bigger languages

- African linguists that are begining the documentation of languages are only documenting THEIR language and not going out to study the other more endangered languages. And even if they did want to go out to study the other languages the training in fieldwork that they have received would not be effective.