Fieldwork Ethics for Work on Endangered Languages

As work on endangered languages is becoming an acknowledged priority of the linguistic profession, it also becomes necessary to develop a more consciously ethical model of field research in the face of increasingly more complex field situations.

There are signs of an increasingly orchestrated response of the linguistic profession to the issue of the rapid decline of the vast majority of the languages of the world. Linguists are becoming engaged in the debate of whether and how to document, protect, and maintain endangered languages. The debate has progressed through a chain of events starting with a special symposium on endangered languages which was followed by the LSA resolution to respond to the situation by “encouraging the documentation, study, and measures in support of obsolescent and threatened languages” and by the creation of the LSA Committee on Endangered Languages, which established special sessions on endangered languages. The debate on the position of field linguists working on endangered languages can be partly followed in a series of “Language” publications. Meanwhile the Permanent International Committee of Linguists sponsored the publication of a state of affairs study of endangered languages.

The earliest and most intense scene of debate was Australia, where field linguists were confronted with the issue of what constitutes responsible linguistics in the context of work on endangered aboriginal languages. In response to the statement of “Linguistic Rights of Aboriginal and Islander Communities” the Australian Linguistic Society endorsed a statement of professional ethics which makes explicit the responsibility of the linguist toward the linguistic community studied. The issue of endangered languages is being raised in most parts of the world today by indigenous communities of speakers. In the US a move to protect Native American languages from the dangers of the English Only Movement led to the Native Language Act which establishes the right of native communities to protect, maintain, and develop their ethnic languages. In Latin America it was a

central theme of all the protests of indigenous peoples against quincentenary celebrations of the supposed “discovery” of the Americas. An important point to make is that the responsibility toward endangered languages, as spelled out in resolution, encompasses “fostering the granting of degrees, positions, and promotion in academic institutions for such work,” which is to say that the responsibility is not limited to linguistic fieldworkers. All faculty members, independent of their own sphere of specialization, can therefore contribute to minimizing the academic dissonance often noted between the demands of work on endangered languages and the demands of traditional academic careers, and make the work possible.

There is no tradition in the field of linguistics of discussing such issues of ethics, although a fairly ample literature on the matter exists in other fields that also rely on fieldwork, such as various branches of sociology or anthropology. Recent debates on the topic of fieldwork ethics are partly reflected in the updated versions of a number of professional codes of ethics in the social sciences.

This evolution of a fieldwork framework is well captured in a recent work by Cameron which focuses on the issue of the power relationship between the researcher and the researched and outlines three frameworks. The “ethical framework” is the traditional academic

framework of research ON the people, that of the time of the first codes of ethics of the profession; the “advocacy framework” is about

research ON and FOR the people, while the “empowerment framework” is a framework in the making that responds to the social conditions of present-day field situations and is about research ON, FOR, and WITH the people. This last framework is characterized by a basic collaborative approach which establishes reciprocity between researcher and researched. Models of such collaborative relationships between academic linguists and indigenous communities. Working FOR and WITH the people means linguists getting involved in language maintenance and language revitalization projects. It also means building into the work the training of native and regional linguists whenever possible. Language revitalization of obsolescent languages is an issue of debate well articulated by Fishman who argues that it is a matter of ideology whether the attempt is even considered desirable. For those of the linguistic profession who believe it is, the question then turns to whether “reversing language shift” is possible, and if it is, what the responsibility of the linguists in the process might be.

An example of such a project which combines academic salvage linguistics and community language management a case of language revitalization of a very obsolescent language for ethnic identity purposes, led by a fluent semi-speaker language rescuer, and described by Craig.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 767