Dying to be counted: The “Audit Culture ” of Documentary Linguistics

As a result of the endangered languages movement, basic documentary work is regaining legitimacy in linguistics. Emerging are new training programs, publications, positions, and, above all, funding initiatives that emphasize fieldwork, corpus creation (i.e., transcription, annotation, and translation), grammar writing, archiving, and community language development. The academic value of small, minority, and other peripheral languages is no longer exhausted by their bearing on linguistic theory (Austin and Simpson 2007). Yet alongside the new humanistic awareness that each language is an “intellectual achievement ” (LSA 1994) which its speakers have a right to enjoy and maintain (LSA 1996), new reductionist discourses have also arisen (Heller and Duchêne 2007) that compare languages in value, particularly in competitive and programmatic contexts such as grant-seeking and standard-setting. Documentary linguists now pose questions that would be inconceivable to ask about major languages, like “how much documentation is enough?” (CELP discussion paper 2007). They find themselves having to play a “numbers game ” in which languages are prioritized by the weakness of their speaker base and their “degree of endangerment, ” using official metrics and scales sanctioned by UNESCO. Research plans are framed around the archival materials to result, a development Nathan (2004) has called “archivism”: quantifiable properties such as recording hours, data volume, and file parameters; and technical desiderata like “archival quality ” and “portability ” have become commonplace reference points in assessing language documentation projects (Bird an