Sustaining vures: making products of language documentation accessible to multiple audiences

With the emergence of language documentation as a distinct sub-discipline of linguistics, and recent advances in technology, there is now a strong emphasis within field-based linguistics on the importance of producing high quality video and audio language data which is annotated and stored in a digital archive. Once archived, the unedited data can be accessed (depending on imposed restrictions) not only by linguists and members of the speech community, but also by any other interested parties. However, if the documentation is only stored as unedited recordings in a digital archive, apart from linguists and members of the language community, most likely it will only be accessed by researchers in disciplines closely linked to linguistics, such as anthropology, ethnomusicology and archaeology, in particular those with a focus on the immediate language area or family. A number of linguists working on language documentation have therefore emphasised the importance of considering from the outset the broad variety of users who could potentially utilise and benefit from a language documentation corpus, and planning and carrying out the data collection accordingly