Sustainable language documentation

Application summary

This project strengthens the inclusion of sustainability into linguistics. Although the role of linguistic diversity for social inclusion and education quality is well-known, the discipline of linguistics is still seeking ways to include sustainable approaches more broadly. We will examine sustainable ways of linguistic research with a collaborative, community-based, long-term documentation project of Cavite, Cotabato and Davao Chabacano, three endangered Spanish contact languages spoken in the Philippines. There is an urgent need to document these languages, as they are severely endangered and minoritized in their local, national, and research contexts. A team of three researchers and community participants cooperates in this four-year project. Based on framework that combines ethnographic approaches to language documentation, critical discourse studies and nexus analysis, we offer a problem-based and action-oriented analysis of meanings of sustainability and sustainable ways of conducting linguistic research. The materials are collected with and in the communities, in addition to the processing of already collected legacy materials. The project builds on collaborative language work answering how linguistics and language documentation contribute to cultural, social, and environmental sustainability and preservation goals. It places special focus on multilingual repertoires and ecologies as a sustainable environment that challenges understandings of sustainable linguistics. The outcomes will be a documentary corpus of the three languages deposited at the Endangered Languages Archive, up-to-date information on their status and multilingual language practices, language preservation materials for the community, and a general model for sustainable language documentation that can be applied to a variety of contexts. All in all, the project aims to plant seeds for future transformation and sustainability in the field of linguistics and language documentation.