Panel abstract EASAS conference

Panel Abstract: The old quip attributed to Uriel Weinreich, that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, is being replaced in these progressive days: a language is a dialect with a dictionary, grammar, parser and a multi-million word corpus of texts – and they’d better all be computer tractable. When you’ve got all of those, get yourself a speech database, and your language will be poised to compete on terms of equality in the new Information Society. (Ostler 1998)

The increasing internationalism in the twentieth century with a small group of nations dominating the scene, has had an adverse effect on the maintenance of social and cultural traditions of many communities. According to Krauss (1996), 3000 of today’s 6000 languages will disappear in this century, if no extra measures are taken. Issues relating to language death, endangernment and threat to linguistic diversity have dominated the scene (Krauss (1996), Hale (1992)) and efforts to revitalize endangered languages and to regress the phenomenon of language death have been the themes of several conferences (including UN conference).
A language is a reflection of the community that speaks it. It embodies the philosophy and the world-view of its people. In communities which lack a writing system, this knowledge is handed down orally from one generation to the next. When a language dies, which happens with increasing frequency in our modern world, we lose not only the linguistic knowledge of that community, but also the knowledge about its culture. One important way of ensuring that the knowledge about indigenous languages and cultures is not totally and irrevocably lost is by documenting these languages and by spreading information about languages and cultures of these communities to a wider audience.
Recent developments in internet technology have the potential to enormously change the way that we collect, store, organize, analyze and disseminate linguistic data. Internet provides opportunities for producing as well as making the material available to a larger audience cost-effectively with the possibility for updating the material. The focus in language technology has, unfortunately, been on major Western languages until recently. There is a growing awareness in the research community that these technical advances can and should also be used in documenting minority languages as this could be an effective tool for spreading awareness about these languages and for maintaining linguistic diversity (Ó Cróinín 2000). It should, at the same time, also be highlighted that it is not only the minority languages which stand to gain from this collaboration, rather also the domain of language technology itself – it gains a testing ground for evaluating its tools and programs on languages which differ significantly (typologically) from literate Western. While internet has its obvious advantages for documenting and disseminating information about minority languages, it also raises important questions which need to be addressed.
The aim of this panel is to discuss the impact of globalization on the minority languages in South Asia and how modern technology can be a tool in documenting these languages and in spreading awareness about these languages. Issues that arise while applying technology developed using primarily Western literate languages to these primarily oral languages will also be taken up by this panel. Some key people in this area have already indicated their willingness to participate in this panel.

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel:

Paper Giver 1: Jens Allwood, Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden

Paper Giver 2: Lars Borin, Department of Swedish, Gothenburg University, Sweden

Paper Abstract: It could be argued that language technology has been shaped by the typological and other traits of the most explored language, namely English. However, English is in some respects an atypical language, and it would consequently be a mistake to believe that traits such as the ones listed and others will be characteristic of all or a large number of languages. I hasten to add that these traits are found in other languages, too, and not only in those genetically or geographically close to English. My point – which I am not the first to have made – is simply that there is an abundance of languages which work differently from English, and the question then rightly raises itself, whether the same language technology methods which have worked so well for English will work equally well for languages drastically different from English in these and other respects. In this presentation I will raise some questions concerning the state of Language Technology today and some possible ways of applying this technology to lesser-known languages.

Paper Giver 3: Eva A. Csato, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Sweden

Paper 3 Title: The role of multimedia publications in the maintenance of endangered languages

Paper Abstract: The talk will describe a multimedia, community-based approach to the documentation of the highly endangered Karaim language in Lithuania and experiences gained through applying multimedia products in the revitalisation of this language. Karaim is a Kipchak Turkic language spoken today of about forty speakers in Lithuania. The language has retained some archaic features, and has partly undergone a typological metamorphosis due to changes induced by intensive contact with Slavic and Baltic languages.
I have developed together with David Nathan, Endangered Languages Academic Program, Department of Linguistics, School of Oriental and African Studies, a multimedia CD on the Karaim language. This CD, Spoken Karaim, which will be shortly demonstrated, is based on linguistic and cultural materials recorded and collected in cooperation with community members. The creation of multimedia products, such as this CD, encourages new patterns and styles of cooperation between linguists and speakers of endangered languages. When a multimedia product is presented to community members, linguists can learn much from the various types of feedback, learning, and other usages of the materials—some of which, invariably in our experience, are unpredicted. In many cases of language revitalisation, the most important actors are children who are learning the language, and the older generation whose members retain language competence. Experiences gained through employing the Karaim CD in the revitalisation of the Karaim language will be evaluated from a general point of view.

Paper Title: Digitizing endangered speech traditions in east Nepal: The Chintang / Puma Documentation Project (DOBES)

Paper Abstract: Chintang and Puma are two little known Kiranti languages which are highly endangered. Chintang is spoken mainly in one Village Development Committee, and nowhere else, while Puma, though being a bit more widespread, is increasingly replaced by Bantawa, a local lingua franca. Both languages are affected by the dominance of Nepali, the national language. The Chintang / Puma Documentation Project, undertaken under the DOBES Programme (financed by the Volkswagen Foundation), aims at a comprehensive linguistic documentation of the present speech practices: it also comprises the study of child language acquisition (in the case of Chintang) and the documentation of ethnographic conditions, including the oral and ritual tradition. Recordings are done mainly with digital video equipment, and the resulting data will be eventually stored and made accessable (within limits) in a digital archive at the Max Planck Institute at Nijmegen. The paper will give an overview of the project, including a demonstration of the resulting format.

Paper Giver 5: Colette Grinevald, Université Lyon 2 and CNRS, France

Paper 5 Title: Intellectual Property, fieldwork and IT

Paper Giver 6: Arthur Holmer & Jan-Olof Svantesson, Department of Linguistics & Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden

Paper Abstract: Kammu is spoken by approximately 500.000 people in northern Laos. Due to social factors (in particular as a consequence of the Vietnam war) most Kammu villages were abandoned and today, people of Kammu ethnicity live in mixed communities together with speakers of Lao Lum (Lao), Lao Sung (Hmong-Mien). As a result of assimilation, there are hardly any monolingual Kammu speakers left. This has also had an effect on the language itself: in this presentation, it will be shown how not only the Kammu lexicon, but also the grammar of the language, is changing, adopting features which are clearly Lao in origin. This process, which was evident already before traditional Kammu society started to disintegrate, is accelerating, and in this respect, while Kammu is not an endangered language numerically speaking, it might be argued that Kammu in its non-assimilated form is not only severely endangered, but in fact almost extinct.

Paper 7 Title: Sidhi, the East African community in Gujarat: Globalization in earlier days and their situation today

Paper Abstract: In the face of globalization which seems to make the world become more inter-connected, and individual countries more intra-connected, ethnicity is increasingly emphasised in many parts of the world where claims to specific local identities and renewed or (re)constructed authenticity are more loudly presented.
The Sidhi of Gujarat in India are a fragmented East African community of mixed ancestry having its roots in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Somalia and also the Sudan and Nigeria. They are primarily descendants of Muslim African traders, sailors and mercenaries, and those few Hindu and Christian Sidhi in the former Portuguese enclaves are mainly of slave origin. They speak Gujarati and Cutchi with only about a dozen Swahili/Bantu expressions mostly connected with their Sufi ritual dances and music.
After a long period of isolation, Western anthropological and historical interest in the various Sidhi communities has given them a wider recognition both at home and abroad. In the last five years, Sidhi cultural societies have been organising international festivals in Gujarat and also participating in international gatherings in East Africa with their song and dance troupes which have also been touring the West. These renewed contacts of the Sidhi with East Africa have increased slightly the number of Swahili/Bantu word stock in their Gujarati and Cutchi, for example the Sidhi, though culturally and linguistically de facto Indian, are emphasising their African heritage and their entertainment groups are now increasingly using Swahili greetings when addressing their public, and their men dress like the East African Swahili Muslims.
Globalization and technological advances have strongly pushed the Sidhi communities in the general trend in the world of nations becoming culturally heterogeneous, with minority languages in some cases playing the role of an essential factor of ethnic identity.

Paper 8 Title: Ethnic Consciousness and the Politicization of Language in West-Central Nepal

Paper Abstract: The aim of this paper is to describe the state of play between the rise of ethnic consciousness and attitudes toward language of some Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples of west-central Nepal. The main points to be discussed are 1) that language issues have not yet been pushed to the forefront of the political agenda, and 2) that ethnic organizations are still at the beginning stages of dealing with matters of documentation, standardization, and orthography of their ancestral languages.
For many ethnic groups in west-central Nepal, ethnic consciousness [the politicization of ethnic identity] has been slow to develop. Nepal is an undeveloped country which has experienced relatively little investment in either infrastructure [communications, transportation, etc.] or education. It has also experienced despotic regimes which have actively discouraged expressions of ethnic identity that were at variance with the official state promotion of Nepalese nationalism and the Hindu religion. One result of all of this was that ethnic, religious, cultural, or political activism for much of the 20thc was mostly confined to exiles. The lack of infrastructural and educational development served the nationalist and Hindu-supremacist interests of the state since it helped maintain a population uninfluenced by outside — and potentially subversive — ideas.
The constitution established in the aftermath of the 1990 people’s movement reaffirmed the status of Nepal as a Hindu state and Nepali as the sole national language, but legalized the establishment of ethnic organizations and the use of indigenous languages other than Nepali in the primary schools. [English and Sanskrit had been long established in education, though in different spheres.] However, use of indigenous languages in the schools has been hampered by practical difficulties and official indifference, and recent court decisions have reaffirmed the official monopoly of Nepali even at the local government level.
The political demands of the ethnic organizations have mostly been in the form of what might be called ‘civil ethnicity’: the demand for a more equitable allocation of resources in the Nepalese state. Ethnic political activism has seldom placed language issues at the forefront for several reasons: 1) economic grievances are considerable and well grounded in the experience of ordinary people; 2) most people don’t see a link between their economic grievances and the official status of their mother tongues; 3) bilingualism in Nepali is sufficiently widespread among ethnics so that few could claim lack of access to economic resources on the basis of language alone; 4) many members of ethnic groups nowadays speak Nepali, not their ancestral language, as their mother tongue; and 5) ethnic consciousness translatable into political action has not penetrated deeply into Nepalese society, despite the strength of ethnic identity. As a result, language issues have been largely backgrounded, despite the attempts by activists to foreground them.
Language issues are largely the concern of educated elites, but this is not to say that ordinary people are insensitive to them. A recent poll reveals that there is considerable support for government efforts to preserve indigenous languages, though there is much less support for using them as the medium of education. Further, the rise in percentages of ethnics claiming their ancestral language as their mother tongue has increased, as documented by the latest census figures, attesting to the success of the ethnic organizations in promoting ethnic consciousness.
The Tibeto-Burman languages of west-central Nepal lack a literate tradition and consequently issues of orthography, documentation, and standardization remain to be addressed if the languages can be made to serve in education or administration, a problem aggrevated by the fact that there are often great difference between dialects. Ethnic organizations, for the most part, have not addressed these issues, and where they’ve tried to address them the result has sometimes been to divide, rather then unite, the group. The use of these languages in print and electronic media has been hindered by the lack of progress in this area.
In this paper, these matters will be illustrated with examples taken from the experiences of the Chantyal, Gurung, Magar, and Tamang communities.

Paper Giver 9: Anju Saxena, Uppsala University, Sweden & Udaya Narayana Singh, CIIL, India

Paper 9 Title: Digital documentation of lesser-known languges in India

Paper Abstract: Our aim here to present the research project Digital documentation of Indian minority languages of which Anju Saxena is the Principal Investigator and Udaya Narayana Singh is the Principal Collaborator . The aim of this project is to collect, organize and disseminate information on some lesser-known Indian languages, many of which are threatened with extinction. The project will include linguistic documentation (i.e. texts and speech files) as well as documentation anchoring this linguistic material to social and cultural aspects of these communities. The results of this project will directly as well as indirectly combat the phenomenon of language death by both spreading awareness about these lesser-known languages and by documenting them. To that extent, this project will also be a contribution to work on language endangerment.

Paper Giver 10: Udaya Narayana Singh, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India

Paper 10 Title: Status of smaller languages of India and language technology

Paper Abstract: The paper is clearly divided into two parts – one dealing with issues of theoretical importance that focus on development of smaller languages in a diverse space, and the other presenting a profile of such smaller and lesser-known (and often, least cared for) languages of South Asia.
The first part opens with an argument that development in the socio-cultural sphere has a lot to learn from other kinds of ‘development’. In biological terms, evolution and development are unstoppable processes that are pre-engineered or pre-destined – whatever we may like to call them. Their pace is often decided in advance, which are often – with great degree of success – open to prediction and correction. There could, of course, be exceptions, just as there could be various kinds of deformities. It goes without saying that if one faces deformities of certain kind, there may emerge unforeseen problems. Since biological sciences have made important strides to ‘correct’ such aberrations and as successful medical interventions have set very high standards in medical practices, they present a good model for those engaged in language development and planning. In the literature on Sociolinguistics, this parallel has not been so far brought forth very clearly.
Although one could show that many languages developed naturally, a combination of factors might be responsible for such natural development. However, the pace and course of development of two such languages would not be comparable. What has emerged as an important point from the experience of several multilingual nations that had embarked on language planning activities is that should the states so decide, languages could also be developed through a set of concerted and coordinated efforts. In other words, just as languages develop (naturally), they can also be planned to develop.
Such planning exercises assume great significance in the field of technological developments. One of them has to do with emergence of ‘language technology’ in the world over opening up a wide vista of possibilities. The other has to do with the emerging voice of the ‘Other’, the ‘marginal’ or the ‘subalterns’ who have learned to perfect the art of gaining political concessions on the strength of their weakness, so to say. It is very difficult for a nation state today that marks huge economic profit on the board and an enviable balance of payment position from being a nation that survived on aid some decades ago, and yet not pay due respect to the unwritten norms of civil society. One such norm has to do with caring for the endangered speech communities and other linguistic minorities.
It is important, therefore, to consider the lesser-known languages of South Asia and profile them appropriately – based on which any futuristic projections can be made. This profiling can also be the basis for any future work in proposing the idea of a ‘Language development index’ (Singh and Mallikarjun, In progress) – comparable to PQLI-ratings (or, Physical Quality of Life Index). The present study tries to argue that our efforts to relate such languages with language technology tools generation will promote them through the ladder of any development index that we can think of, including the ‘Language vitality index’ (McConnel and Mohapatra).

Paper Giver 11: Karina Vamling, School of International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Malmoe University, Sweden

Paper Abstract: The aim of the database is to make available on the internet fully glossed examples in several Caucasian languages, showing a number of different grammatical constructions such as morphological causatives, ergative clauses, inversive constructions, evidentials, complex cross-reference marking. The database includes over 600 sentences in Old and Modern Georgian, as well as the lesser-known languages Megrelian (South Caucasian/Kartvelian), Kabardian and Adyghe (West Caucasian). The examples are accessible by search for (1) grammatical categories, (2) prefixes and suffixes, (3) roots of the original language, (4) stems of the language of translation (English).
Special attention has been given to unified principles of glossing. A general feature of Kartvelian verbal morphology that poses an interesting problem and called for a special solution is that morpheme segmentation is often not sufficient in order to show all the grammatical categories present in the forms. In the database, this has been solved by introducing double representations: both glosses with full information about categories as well as morpheme segmentation. This is illustrated in the following Old Georgian example:
mgel-man shech’ama (she-ch’am-a) sxovar-i
wolf-ERG S3SG.O3SG.eat.AOR PRV-eat-S3SG lamb-NOM
‘The wolf ate the lamb’
The database has been developed at the Department of Linguistics at Lund University by Manana Kock Kobaidze, Karina Vamling and Johan Dahl (research engineer).

Paper Giver 12: Dr. Karl-Heinz Grüssner, Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, Germany

Paper 12 Title: Khasi: a minority language of North–East India. From an unwritten to a written language

Paper Abstract: The University Library of Tuebingen belongs to a group of German libraries which were selected by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) for its programme of the so-called Sondersammelgebiete (Special Collection Fields). Tuebingen is responsible for collecting materials on South Asia. Among these a minor section, the collection of Khasi books, has been chosen to represent a small language of the Indian North East and its development from an unwritten language to a written literary language and to point out how this language is used nowadays in private and public affairs, which efforts are made to preserve and to promote the language and which goals have yet to be achieved.

List of participants:

Anju Saxena, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Uppsala University, Sweden

Jens Allwood, Professor, Department of Linguistics, Gothenburg University, Sweden

Lars Borin, Professor, Natural Language Processing, Deparment of Swedish, Göteborg Univeristy, Sweden

Éva Csató Johanson, Associate Professor, Department of Asian and African Languages, Uppsala University, Sweden

Arthur Holmer, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Lund University, Sweden

Gunilla Gren-Eklund, Professor em, Department of Asian and African Languages, Uppsala University, Sweden

Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi, Associate Professor, Department of Asian and African Languages, Uppsala University, Sweden

Michael Noonan, Professor of Linguistics, Department of English, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA

Udaya Narayana Singh, Professor and Director, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Manasagangotri, Mysore, India

Jan-Olof Svantesson, Professor, Department of Linguistics, Lund University, Sweden

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Panel No. 26

Panel Title: Globalization, technological advances and minority languages in South Asia

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel:

List of participants: