MARK TURIN 2012 disappearing languages article.pdf

8/17/2019 MARK TURIN 2012 disappearing languages article.pdf

1/25

MARK TURIN

Voices of vanishing worlds:

Endangered languages, orality, and cognition

Análise Social , , (.º),

-

Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. Av. Professor Aníbal de Bettencourt,

- Lisboa Portugal — [email protected]


2/25

Análise Social , , (.º), , -

Voices of vanishing worlds: Endangered languages, orality,

and cognition. Up to hal o the world’s , languages spo-

ken today may be extinct by the end o this century. Most o

these endangered languages are oral speech orms, with little

i any traditional written literature. I undocumented, these

tongues—each representing a unique insight into human cog-

nition and its most powerul defining eature, language—risk

disappearing without trace. In this article, I discuss the unique

spatial and temporal worlds occupied by communities whose

languages are still principally oral. Drawing on examples rom

the Himalayas, I show how technology is effecting global lin-

guistic diversity and the voices o these vanishing worlds.

Keywords: endangered languages; orality; human cognition;

Himalayas.

Vozes em extinção: línguas ameaçadas, oralidade e cogni-

ção. Cerca de metade das línguas aladas hojeno mundo poderão estar extintas no final deste século.

A maioria destas línguas ameaçadas são ormas de discurso oral,

com pouca ou mesmo nenhuma literatura tradicional escrita.

Se não orem documentadas, estes idiomas – cada um deles

representando uma perspetiva única da cognição humana e

da sua característica definidora mais ponderosa, a linguagem

– correm o risco de desaparecer sem deixar vestígios. Neste

artigo discutem-se os mundos espaciais e temporais únicos

ocupados por estas comunidades cujas línguas são ainda prin-

cipalmente orais. Apoiando-me em exemplos da região dosHimalaias, procuro demonstrar o impacto que a tecnologia

tem vindo a exercer sobre a diversidade linguística global e

sobre as vozes destes mundos em extinção.

Palavras-chave: línguas ameaçadas; oralidade; cognição

humana; Himalaias.

Mark urin » [email protected] » Yale University and the

University o Cambridge.


3/25

MARK URIN

Voices of vanishing worlds:Endangered languages,

orality, and cognition

THE CHALLENGE

Linguistics is a growth industry, yet ever more languages are disappearing

without trace. Tere are now more trained linguists working in the discipline

than there are extant languages to document. oo many stars and not enough

sky. Moreover, as privileged language proessionals, linguists are in a position

to pose ever more nuanced and complex questions o their data… but where

are they sourcing that data? How many doctoral dissertations have been sub-mitted based primarily (or even exclusively) on analyses o the verbal contor-

tions and internal syntax o English, Spanish, and Chinese?

Some may ask whether linguists are proessionally responsible or docu-

menting the world’s vanishing voices. Perhaps this is not their mandate? What

is the role o ever more sophisticated theoretical excursions o the mind (ofen

on language rather than languages) while “Rome burns”? Beyond that, do

linguists even have an ethical or moral responsibility to support communi-

ties engaged in reviving their speech orms, and help—through sharing their

knowledge, resources and networks—revitalisation and reclamation projects,

even in cases when these are politically charged?

We know that linguists do not save languages, speech communities do; but

in this highly articulated documentary and classificatory moment, how should

the scholarly community act? Will linguistics go down in the history o science

as the only discipline that presided over the demise o its own subject matter

and did nothing? Tese are some o the questions that this paper addresses.

I am grateul to Filipe Carreira da Silva and Mónica Vieira or their editorial care, and to the

constructive criticism provided by an anonymous reviewer. Tis article has been much impro-

ved thanks to the reviewer’s comments.


4/25

MARK TURIN

SAFETY I N NUMBERS: LINGUICIDE AND GLOTTOPHAGY

At issue is the quality and depth o the data to which we have access and on

which we, as linguists, build our theoretical architecture. Tere are historically

rich and comprehensive records or only a tiny proportion o the languagesspoken in the world today. Even though some linguists are now engaged in

documenting the diversity o human linguistic expressions with reocused

urgency and dedication, almost hal o the world’s speech orms are critically

endangered and will likely vanish without trace by the end o this century.

Some sobering statistics will help to contextualise the urgency o the task:

the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger released by in early

claims that more than , o the over , languages spoken around the

globe today are in danger o disappearing. Te consulting team rankedthese vanishing voices on a sliding scale rom vulnerable to extinct (Moseley,

): noting that many such speech orms will cease to be used as communi-

cative vernaculars by the next generation o speakers, and that many o these

languages are entirely oral (or signed) and have no established written orm, so

are at risk o disappearing without trace.

Numbers help to underscore the imbalance across the world languages,

and hint at the complex power relationships that encircle and promote them.

According to conservative estimates, o the world’s people speak o theworld’s languages. Conversely, o the world’s languages are spoken by

o the world’s people. Over , languages—one quarter o the total number

o living speech orms—have ewer than , speakers. We now know that

at least o the world’s languages are losing speakers, some o them at a

dramatic rate. Up to o the world’s speech orms may be replaced by domi-

nant regional, national or international languages by . Some activists reer

to such languages—we may naturally jump to name and shame English, but

there are plenty o others (Spanish, Nepali and perhaps even Portuguese)—as“predator languages”, and describe the process as “linguicide”.

While predation may or may not be a helpul metaphor to think with,

given that it evokes so many imaginings drawn rom the natural and animal

worlds (survival o the fittest, or example), the point o the phrase will be

clear: certain languages are simply so socially dynamic, economically effective,

politically well positioned, and downright successul that they eat up other

speech orms. Linguists, enjoying the chance to coin a neologism, have taken

to calling this “glottophagy” (attributed to the Frenchman Louis-Jean Calvet in). We may have to concede that the nicer that people are with one another

(socially, economically and physically), the nastier that their languages are

with each other.


5/25

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES, ORALIT Y, AND COGNIT ION

Yet language death is no new orce, born exclusively o globalisation and its

recent geopolitical pressures. Hal a century ago, in the s, Ukranian-Cana-

dian linguist Jaroslav Bohdan Rudnyckyj gave birth to the term “linguicide”

while exploring the ate o his native Ukranian under Russian linguistic and

political pressure. In so doing, Rudnyckyj knowingly invoked genocide andethnocide, but then as a subcategory relating to language. Tis lexical exten-

sion was adopted and has stuck: in his well-received Genocide: Conceptual and

Historical Dimensions, George J. Andreopoulos (, p. ) offers his readers

a working definition o linguicide as “orbidding the use o or other intentional

destruction o the language o another people—a specific dimension o eth-

nocide”. Unlike glottophagy, which implies an action motivated more by size,

hunger, and natural destiny (i. e. “I ate you because you were there and in my

way”), linguicide makes us think o aggressive destruction. Tere is nothingpredetermined or animal about it, it is strictly human. How better to violate a

people than by killing off their language (c. Kurdish rom the s onwards,

according to Hassanpour, )?

All o this underscores that most o the world’s linguistic diversity is under

the stewardship o a tiny number o people, ofen marginalised within their

own nations who have access to pitiully eroded resources to sustain their

speech orms and ways o lie. Tese speakers—on the ringes o states that

have shown little interest in their welare and culture, ofentimes even activelysupressing them—are the custodians o a large part o our shared human heri-

tage and their threatened languages hold insights into the diversity o our cog-

nitive capacity as a species. Consider the amount o interest and traction that

Dan Everett (, ) has generated with his data on the Pirahã language: a

speech orm with (allegedly) no numbers, no colours, and no recursion. Tese

realisations have sent linguists into spasms o sel-reflection, all thanks to the

documentation o one endangered, oral language. One o thousands o endan-

gered, oral languages.Te death o a language is not simply about words, syntax, and grammar,

nor will it affect only small, “traditional” and largely oral cultures. Languages

convey unique orms o cultural knowledge. Speech orms encode oral tradi-

tions. When elders die and livelihoods are disrupted, it is such creative expres-

sions that become threatened. A well-intentioned and important national

education programme in one o the world’s major languages, such as Manda-

rin Chinese or French, may have the unintended side effect o undermining

local traditions and weakening regional languages. And or many communi-ties around the world, the transmission o oral literature and perormative tra-

ditions rom generation to generation still lies at the heart o cultural practice.

As languages die, established systems o learning and knowledge exchange can


6/25

MARK TURIN

break down. Globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert particularly

complex pressures on smaller communities, ofen eroding expressive diversity

and transorming culture through assimilation to more dominant ways o lie.

While one would think that by now the scholarly community would take

these painul realities to be sel-evident, senior colleagues show us that thereality is otherwise. “A review o leading publications”, Nicholas Evans and

Stephen Levinson (, p. ) write, “suggests that cognitive scientists are

not aware o the real range o linguistic diversity”. It is to that challenge that

I address this paper.

ACTION AND REACTION

Tis woe and misery will not be news to readers o this esteemed journal, butthe scale o the response rom linguists may be. Facilitated by an inusion o

unding rom philanthropic sources, descriptive linguists have been galva-

nized to document the world’s languages with a renewed sense o urgency.

Field linguists (and perhaps most importantly their students: transmission o

academic lineages are afer all as ragile as oral traditions) are now respond-

ing to this threat, effectively and decisively. Even Google is getting involved,

through a partnership with the Alliance or Linguistic Diversity encapsulated

in a visually rich website: .Over the last decade, projects at the School o Oriental and Arican Stud-

ies () in London, at the Max Planck Institute in the Netherlands, and at

the National Science Foundation in the United States have been established to

support the documentation o endangered languages, train a new generation

o field linguists, and work collaboratively with speech communities who are

actively involved in preserving and revitalising their threatened tongues. Even

linguists o a more theoretical bent, such as Noam Chomsky, have become

vocal backers o language documentation projects, realising that the wealth olinguistic orms on which their theories rely are at risk o disappearing unre-

corded. And the importance o the task has also captured the imagination o

a public beyond the academy, with regular media coverage along the lines o

“one language lost every two weeks” or “last speaker o dies”. Tis public

interest is encouraging, as it reflects a wider concern with the attrition o all

orms o diversity, natural and cultural, and points to a civic engagement that

some scholars are leveraging to good effect.

Many linguists have responded by entering into increasingly collabora-tive partnerships with speech communities, producing “documents” that have

both local relevance and academic integrity. Moreover, the growth in access to

digital recording technology has meant that contemporary research initiatives


7/25


8/25

MARK TURIN

documents are the primary products o contemporary research initiatives in

field linguistics, documentary processes naturally warrant closer attention.

Trough these various engagements, I address a theme o recurring concern,

namely that “files are authoritative by virtue o their compilation” (Feldman,

, p. ) and consider what this means or documents that are not onlyborn digital, but increasingly even born archival.

DATA PRACTICES IN FIELD LINGUISTICS

Te recently rejuvenated sub-discipline o descriptive field linguistics is

addicted to data and documents. Scholars generate them, unders demand

them, and members o some speech communities etishize and deploy them

or transparently political ends. Te outputs o research projects that aim todescribe hitherto poorly known and ofen endangered languages are increas-

ingly measured by the volume and output o the documents that they pro-

duce. Quality is not everything, quantity also counts, as demonstrated by a

strong ocus on data curation and uture-proofing strategies in online lan-

guage archives, such as the DoBeS archive in Nijmegen and the Endangered

Languages Archive maintained at the School o Oriental and Arican Studies

in London.2

Tat linguistic documentation projects should be so explicitly absorbedwith the production and distribution o data is worthy o study in itsel, but o

particular interest to us here is the degree to which these contemporary lan-

guage collectors pause to reflect on the political implications o their work, and

the extent to which they are being asked to consider the community conse-

quences o their documentation. I would argue that field linguists have consi-

derable experience o dealing with the cognitive tension between analogue,

tangible documents (printed word lists and grammatical sketches) versus

those whose genesis and distribution strategy is largely digital and intangible(database records, digital entries into online archives, or logged audio-video

content), even i much o this discussion is not aired in polite company (and is

elided during promotion and tenure reviews).

Megill and Schantz (, p. ) rather provocatively suggested that

“document becomes a verb or the archivist”. Six years later, in his Corporate

Memory: Records and Information Management in the Knowledge Age, Megill

fine-tuned his earlier position with an entire chapter on “Te Document as

Verb”, proposing that while the International Organization or Standardization() defines a document as an object, “in the Knowledge Age, a document is

2 Some o this section and the arguments that it contains were first developed in urin ().


9/25


more ofen a verb than a noun” (Megill, , p. ). I would extend Megill’s

proposition urther and suggest that in my work, and also or other ethnogra-

phers, field linguists and museum curators, document has always been both a

verb and a noun. While an explicit ocus on the agency and subjectivity o the

fieldwork endeavour may be a more recent concern, field linguistics has beenmotivated by the calling o primary documentation since it began. Researchers

have collected data on the diversity o human linguistic expressions, with the

field linguist positioned as both documenter o a specific language and sub-

sequently producing documents (as nouns and objects) that are quantifiable

products. Present-day linguists are being asked or ever more inormation on

the pragmatics and ethics o their collection methods at the point o archival

accession and deposit, and students are being trained to document (verb) their

documents (noun) by providing data about their data (meta-data).In this context, Dobrin and Berson (, p. ) write eloquently o the

“crisis o documentation” affecting field linguistics. Te nod to anthropology’s

great moment o introspection, popularly ramed as “the crisis o represen-

tation”, is unambiguous. Language documentation, they argue, is an increas-

ingly social activity (Dobrin and Berson, , p. ), with documentary

linguists going to great lengths to “establish more equitable power relations

with speakers through use o participatory, community-based research pro-

tocols” (Dobrin and Berson, , p. ). Tis engagement is surely to becelebrated, but it has not been an equally comortable transition or all, creat-

ing some cognitive dissonance in the discipline and among its practitioners.

Te recognition o speakers o endangered languages “as persons, as opposed

to mere sources o data” (Dobrin and Berson, , p. ) combined with

the dawning realisation that fieldworkers ofen inadvertently document an

idiolect (a variety o a language unique to an individual) or at best a socio-

lect (spoken by only one socio-economic segment o the community), rather

than anything that can be called a language as a whole, has generated a raf onew questions that linguists need to address. For scholars habituated to certain

work practices and theoretical positions, a degree o discomort can emerge

rom holding such potentially conflicting ideas simultaneously.

Research projects in field linguistics are increasingly being ramed and

marketed as cooperative, community-based, participatory collaborations or

social good—at least to unders and in public declarations—a kind o social

movement “that has brought academic linguists out o their offices and librar-

ies and into a shared space” (Dobrin and Berson, , p. ). In the mindso many contemporary linguists working on endangered languages, the cre-

ation o linguistic documents as well as the exercise o documentation itsel

has explicit activist components. While nations may continue to discriminate


10/25

MARK TURIN

against minority languages and their speakers through punitive legislation

and enorced structural invisibility, some linguists have taken on the roles o

advocate, supporter and—in all senses—documenter o speech communities.

Dobrin and Berson (, p. ) note that the “thematicization o collabo-

ration” that has emerged as a central methodological issue in documentarylinguistics knows no precedent in the discipline.

Linguistics, then, has made the transition rom documentation as salvage

or rescue work—which set out to reclaim rom the debris o modernity the

last vestiges o indigenous linguistic purity—to viewing documentation as a

participatory and even community-led process, through which differently pri-

oritized and variously weighted documents are produced or diverse groups

o stakeholders: a simple acknowledgement o multivalence. o be clear, lin-

guists have not become political activists or community mobilisers overnight,but have rather started to acknowledge that the same data can be retooled

and retasked in different packages that can satisy both their need or career

advancement and publication, and the requirements o unding agencies and

speech communities whose languages they have had the privilege o research-

ing. Rather than shying away rom potential conrontations, or viewing this

reconfigured research landscape as a systemic challenge to their knowledge

system, some more entrepreneurial linguists have embraced the new idiom o

collaboration with speakers o minority languages as an exciting opportunityor innovative research.

But as anthropologists have discovered through many decades o raught

and contested engagements, at the heart o this new linguistics lies a grow-

ing awareness that the “power imbalance in the documentary encounter …

is at odds with the motivations or conducting the research in the first place”

(Dobrin and Berson, , p. ). wo dilemmas lie at the heart o these new

linguistic partnerships.

First, the act o creating and disseminating traditional linguistic objectsand documents—such as grammars, texts, dictionaries, and corpora (real

world examples o natural spoken language)—may unwittingly reproduce

the very same “suspect power hierarchy that linguistics-in-recognition-o-

indigenous-rights” so proudly set out to dismantle (Dobrin and Berson, ,

p. ). Second, and even more troubling or the heuristically minded language

fieldworker, is that communities—like their languages—are rarely as bounded

as first hoped. Even though linguists have introduced into their descriptive

and scholarly lexicon a range o terminologies to add nuance to the continuumo articulations that lie along the accent-dialect-language spectrum, ew have

been equally reflexive about the porosity and fluidity o ethnic and political

boundaries. Linguistic monographs are still built on meaty chapters devoted to


11/25


complex verbal morphology and clause structure, with discussions o the cul-

tural history o a speech community usually relegated to a slim section entitled

“Te People”. What happens when these speakers turn out to have as many

political positions as they have dialects and voices, with various groups lay-

ing claim to different agendas and aspirations? And then what i the subjects(no longer objects) o study—still commonly reerred to by linguists as “inor-

mants” or the altogether more World Bankish term “consultants”—willingly

participate and collude in their own objectification and “documentization” or

their own ethno-political ends?

Linguists are noticing that collaboration works both ways—they are being

“collaborated with” as well as “collaborating with”—and recognising that the

documents o their research, as well as the documenters themselves, are being

harnessed by speech communities in creative and ofen unexpected ways. As acase in point, I turn to a discussion o my own work on Tangmi, an unwritten

ibeto-Burman language spoken by around , people in northern-central

Nepal and in the Darjeeling district o the state o West Bengal in India.

THANGMI: ACTIVISTS IN SEARCH OF A LINGUIST

Afer almost a decade o research on the Tangmi language, I finally pro-

duced a desirable document in : a grammar o two dialects o the lan-guage, incorporating a number o shamanic oral texts, some ethnography,

and a trilingual lexicon. Te manuscript—while much anticipated by some in

the Tangmi community (perhaps because it was so long overdue)—was not

equally well received by all o the speakers with whom I had worked. Te s

and early years o the st century were a period o massive political and social

upheaval or Nepal, with a violent civil war and a level o instability that the

country had not seen in its recent history. Trough this period o unrest, which

coincided with my research, many members o the Tangmi community—oneo Nepal’s most traditionally marginalized and economically impoverished

peoples—were beginning to assert themselves and proclaim their ethnic pride.

Tey claimed autochthony in a traditional homeland and the existence o a

unique language, with activists positioning the group as deserving attention

rom the national administration. While some Tangmi were still interested

in the more abstract idea—and then the product—o a descriptive grammar

o their language, others were beginning to ask what it was or, who owned it,

why it was in English, and how it was going to help them.As a partial and anticipatory response to these substantive questions, two

years beore my dissertation was completed, I had already compiled a Nepali-

Tangmi-English Dictionary together with my long-time Tangmi research


12/25

MARK TURIN

assistant (urin and Tami, ). Published in Kathmandu with a printing

subvention rom the British Embassy in Nepal to make it more affordable,

I had somewhat naively thought that this trilingual lexical booklet would ore-

stall some o the criticism. In act, the production o our dictionary simply

provided a timely spark to an outpouring o local lexicography that accompa-nied a critique o my endeavour. Our perunctory word list served to catalyse

two urther dictionaries in response, both compiled solely by native speakers

without oreign intervention or unding, and both also larger, heavier, and

more complete as documentary products. Rather like an archetypal airly

tale, the dictionaries just kept on getting bigger in line with the dream o a

comprehensive, “complete” Tangmi dictionary. Our humble undertaking

had been just an early appetizer. Te gold standard and ultimate documents

or comparison were large, heavy, monolingual Nepali dictionaries; and localuntrained lexicographers were working toward such a monograph by indi-

genizing Nepali words and including every possible verbal conjugation in their

lists to bolster the number o pages and thus engorge the lexicon. Afer centu-

ries o orthographical invisibility, dictionaries—as political documents—were

becoming a new unit o value, conceived o and then compiled and deployed

in competitive displays o local lexicography to garner the avour and atten-

tion o a newly inclusive state that was taking stock o its linguistic minorities

and beginning to offer them tangible benefits calibrated to their perceivedlevel o indigeneity.

In comparing the contents o the two documents that I had produced, a

question had suraced among my Tangmi interlocutors: how could the mas-

sive differential between the size o my dissertation ( pages) and the size

o the tiny collaborative dictionary ( pages) be explained? What was in the

English (oreign) book that was not in the Nepali (local) one? What was I leav-

ing out? Was the community being short-changed? For some Tangmi speak-

ers, my dissertation had achieved a positive symbolic status (large heavy book)but had no practical role (impenetrable linguistic annotation and in English),

while the shorter collaborative dictionary had a noted practical effect (acces-

sible and affordable) but was lacking in symbolic impact (on account o being

locally published and so small). Tangmi language activists wanted both prac-

tical impact and symbolic capital or their documents—and who could blame

them—and regarded my endeavour as a useul proo o concept that could be

improved upon and developed urther. As Riles (, p. ) has noted, docu-

ments can change “social and material orm” as they move rom one setting(a dissertation to be evaluated within a university) to another (a resource or

a community o practice). Te journey o my monograph, I would argue, was

even more undamental, changing not only in orm but also in meaning: rom


13/25


distilling a decade o research, to effectively distancing a community rom their

speech orm, in its embodiment as an objectified and impenetrable document

about rather than in their language. When creating my linguistic documents,

I had not anticipated how they would be received, circulated, instrumental-

ised, and taken apart (Riles, , p. )—how could I?—even though I hadworked collaboratively and consulted community members at each step along

the way.

Without dwelling urther on the process o indigenous lexicography, there

are two issues worth drawing out. First, as anthropologists know ull well and

as linguists are just beginning to discover, partnerships and collaborations are

always contested and can lead to cognitive challenges and conceptual realign-

ments. Te simple rerain o “giving back to the community”, to be ound in

so many contemporary grant proposals, is more problematic than many imag-ine. Documents are powerul and potent, and the authority and authorship o

documents is seldom singular. Second, I suggest that in these contestations lie

interesting research questions that only begin to emerge when the researcher

engages with community demands. Tis process o negotiation and arbitra-

tion can be enormously intellectually ulfilling, as it helps to first challenge and

then transcend mechanical discussions o cultural repatriation to arrive at a

more finely graded position where trust is established and maintained through

collaborative work.

SPEECH : TEXT, ORALITY :

LITERACY, AND THE TE CHNOLOGICAL BEYOND

Trough all o this, the Tangmi community—and I as their partial agent

and sometime linguistic advocate—were journeying on the well trodden path

rom orality to literacy, leveraging their verbal expressions into written orm

through documents: sometimes digital, mostly physical and invariably politi-cal. Tere is no space to dwell on the wider issues o orality and textuality here

(we might reer to Ong, ; Pollock, , Finnegan, and Gaenszle,

or helpul discussions), but we must make space to address the some-

times surprising directionality o the process among the Tangmi o Nepal:

rom textual to oral, as well as (the more traditional and expected) other way

around, oral to textual.

In a recent compilation o his ormative essays on myth, ritual, and orality,

the Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody returns to one o his primary con-cerns: looking at societies more rom the actor’s point o view’ and acknowl-

edging the immense creative power o the human mind as played out through

culture. o quote Goody:


14/25

MARK TURIN

[…] considering such orms not as a fixed, ormulaic product but as reflecting man’s

creativity, as a language-using animal in ace o the world, not ree rom tradition but not

bound down by it [Goody, , p. ].

Goody remains unsatisfied by the simple, sometimes almost evolutionarydiscussion, o communities and individuals moving rom orality to textual-

ity, as i this process were inevitable and monodirectional. While the oral and

written are o course, he confirms, distinct registers with major differences, we

would do well to recall the ways in which writing can also influence the spoken

word, a process that he calls “the lecto-oral” (Goody, , p. ). Since writ-

ing almost always ollows speech (in natural rather than computer languages,

at least), its advent has “necessarily had a proound influence on the latter,

which is never the same as when it stands alone” (Goody, , p. ). Whileoratory is ofen a major practice in entirely oral cultures, its “ormal counter-

part, rhetoric, with an explicit body o written rules” (Goody, , p. ) is an

example o this lecto-oral response. o push urther still, Goody argues, epic is

really a written genre that has gone oral (these days, we might say “gone viral”):

At the very moment in history when writing allows one to dispose o verbal memory

as a means o recalling such works, the role o such memory is in act enhanced—hence

part o the difficulty in deciding whether these works are both orally composed and orallyreproduced [Goody, , p. ].

Te point that some degree o two-way traffic exists between the writ-

ten word and speech is cognitively interesting and particularly salient in the

context o the Himalayas, where a pervading ideology exists which suggests

that in order to be a real language, a speech orm has to be written. In such a

“caste” system o languages, underwritten by a lexical hierarchy o authority

and orthodoxy, some Tangmi language activists have been apprenticing withelder shamans to textualise the oral tradition (myths, cosmology, and ritual

invocations). Once these “texts” have been standardised in written orm, they

are exported around the region and repatriated to areas where the language has

been eroded or such documents to be internalised, ingested, and memorised

or uture perormance. In this circulation, then, orality has come ull circle,

albeit acilitated by text. We would do well to recall Michael Corballis’s point

made in this volume about the different affordances o manual language versus

speech: the ormer requires light and physical proximity, whereas speech is just as effective at night or when obstacles prevent visual access and cues. Te

same holds or writing, as written text can also easily be obscured by darkness

and distance.


15/25


We would do well to reflect on the question o how one can write about a

culture that has already been written by its native spokesmen (Burghart, ).

How do partnerships actually work, and how are technologies (whether writ-

ten or digital) changing both the experience o documentation and the docu-

ment itsel? Once again, the apparent contradiction o globalisation is locatedin that final question: the very processes that are portrayed as eroding cultural

and linguistic diversity are at once bringing individuals into closer contact

with one another and providing affordable and appropriate tools to document

these expressions in non-linear orm. As the much mourned John Miles Foley

noted, oral tradition and the Internet can be seen as “homologous technologies

o communication”, a convergence that is not lost on members o the Tangmi

community who perceive new digital recording technologies to be opening up

not only documentary, but also representational, space or their own expres-sions which had previously been precluded by the long dominance o textual

modes o production and dissemination.

But what o language in situ, and multilingualism? Many older Tangmi in

villages across Nepal are still not literate, or at least not effectively literate, but

remain doggedly multilingual—in Tangmi, some Nepali, and perhaps Hindi

or another regionally dominant language. Yet their children are increasingly

literate and monolingual. May we propose a strange correlation between lin-

guistic plurality in an oral world versus a narrowing, even constrictive mono-lingualism, when literacy and text become widespread?

Tese days, ever ewer ethnic Tangmi speak the Tangmi language. Many

community members have taken to speaking Nepali, the national language

that is taught in schools and spread through the media, and their competence

in their ancestral language is rapidly declining. While growing fluency in any

national language is naturally to be encouraged, and no small eat or an eco-

nomically unstable country such as Nepal, such progress can be at the expense

o unwritten speech orms. Within a single Tangmi amily to this day, it ispossible to find a Tangmi-speaking grandparent living in the same household

as their middle-aged child who is bilingual in Tangmi and Nepali, alongside

grandchildren enrolled in a government school who speak only Nepali. While

this is not an unusual picture around the world, such complete language shif

in the space o two generations (with grandparents and grandchildren not

sharing fluency in a common language) can be a massive rupture or a small

speech community, and one that can have a proound impact on the transmis-

sion o cultural knowledge and history.Communities that may have been plurilingual a generation ago, speak-

ing different languages in different social contexts (the home, the local bazaar

and elsewhere in the region when trading), are now increasingly schooled


16/25

MARK TURIN

through the medium o a national language that firmly instils and reinorces

monolingual identities, and monolingual cognitive rames. Even today, mul-

tilingualism is ofen tragically portrayed as an impediment to ull citizenship

and participation in a modern nation state. Tis is certainly the case in Nepal,

where only two decades ago the nation building experiment effaced all linguis-tic diversity in the name o ostering unity: in one language, one religion, and

one nation. While legislation in Nepal has become more progressive over time,

when communities actually articulate and challenge hegemonic notions o lin-

guistic belonging in the courts or through education, the state regularly rejects

their claims, resulting in an implementation gap between aspirational legis-

lative rameworks, on the one hand, and practical linguistic realities, on the

other. In so many countries, linguistic diversity—whether national, regional,

or local—is being eroded rather than nourished, challenged when it should besupported.

LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS AND C OGNITION

In , the National Science Foundation released a Special Report on the

state o endangered languages. Under a heading entitled “Why It Matters”, the

author o the report, Elizabeth Malone, asserts that:

Te enormous variety o these languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on

which linguists, cognitive scientists and philosophers can chart the ull capabilities—and

limits—o the human mind [Malone, ].

Te idea—by no means novel but still important—that the tapestry o

human expressive diversity remains an untapped sandbox or linguistic exper-

imentation has generated considerable traction in the last ew years. Te cog-

nitive argument, certainly in the context o the present issue o this journal, isparticularly interesting. In , Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson pub-

lished an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences entitled “Te myth o lan-

guage universals: Language diversity and its importance or cognitive science”.

Teir contribution was powerully argued, generating over pages o “Open

Peer Commentary” (their initial contribution weighed in at under pages).

Teir principal contention is that:

alk o linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languagesare all built to a common pattern. In act, there are vanishingly ew universals o language

in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be ound at almost

every level o linguistic organization.


17/25


Tis undamentally changes the object o enquiry rom a cognitive science perspective.

Tis target article summarizes decades o cross-linguistic work by typologists and descrip-

tive linguists, showing just how ew and unproound the universal characteristics o lan-

guage are, once we honestly conront the diversity offered to us by the world’s , to

, languages.Afer surveying the various uses o “universal”, we illustrate the ways languages vary

radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more

detail the core grammatical machinery o recursion, constituency, and grammatical rela-

tions [Evans and Levinson, , p. ].

Few in field linguistics could have hoped or a more strongly worded

endorsement rom prominent colleagues. As Evans and Levinson put it, lin-

guistic diversity “becomes the crucial datum or cognitive science”, because“recognizing the true extent o structural diversity in human language opens

up exciting new research directions or cognitive scientists (…) conront-

ing us with the extraordinary plasticity o the highest human skills” (Evans

and Levinson, , p. ). In particular, Evans and Levinson pick a bone

with the claims o Universal Grammar, which they regard as “either empiri-

cally alse, unalsifiable, or misleading in that they reer to tendencies rather

than strict universals” (Evans and Levinson, , p. ). Teir critique o

the Chomskian way, and all o the theoretical apparatus that it endorses andencourages, is unequivocal and hard-hitting: “this widespread misconception

o language uniormity’ can in part be attributed “simply to ethnocentrism”

(Evans and Levinson, , p. ). We are reminded once again o Goody,

who stresses throughout “the imaginative actor, individual ‘creation’, vari-

ability, and thereore the undamental difficulty o any deep analysis” (Goody,

, p. ). Simply put, cross-cultural comparison and cross-linguistic

analysis is ar more challenging when one’s conceptual rames are widened

to include the ull range o human ethnolinguistic experience. In short, it isar easier to compare like with like when you are dealing only with English,

French, and Spanish.

Evans and Levinson’s argument or the repositioning o diversity as cen-

tral to understanding our cognitive selves strikes a chord with the central

argument in Michael Corballis’s recent Te Recursive Mind . In his elegant

Preace, Corballis prioritises thought—in other words cognition—over

language: “Where Chomsky views thought through the lens o language,

I preer to view language though the lens o thought (Corballis, , p. ix).Recursion, as Corballis presents it, is a mental and cognitive process, and not

something that is necessarily bundled up with words and ramed through

vowels.


18/25

MARK TURIN

LEARNING ORALITY ORALLY: COGNI TIVE CHALLENGES

While Tangmi is no Pirahã, and I am certainly no Everett, what better way

to illustrate the cognitive limitations o the fieldworker-linguist than by laying

bare the challenging process o actually learning such a language. My prog-ress in Tangmi was desperately slow, every success being eroded by another

moment o conusion at a more complex puzzle lying in wait. It took me the

best part o three years to learn Tangmi to a decent enough level to tell a

joke, and then another year to be able to tell a joke that was actually unny.

Tis underscores the importance o the cultural element in language: while I

had become grammatically adult, I was still a cultural child, with no real sense

o what was locally relevant, resonant and meaningul. Learning an unwrit-

ten language, or individuals as heavily invested in text and list making as Iwas, was a tough challenge. It is what people reer to in the United States as a

“big ask”. It was also, my Dutch grandmother would have said, a verkleutering :

a return to the naivety o childish expression (but without any o the associated

benefits). Trough learning a language so different to one’s own, one leaves

the world o sophisticated linguistic competence—o confidence, fluency, and

wit—only to regress to lexical inancy. Te cognitive challenges o doing field-

work on, in, and through an unwritten language were intense and unremitting.

Part o my struggle was that I was used to learning languages rom bookswhere someone else had taken the time to parse each word out and explain the

rules o grammar. With Tangmi, I was aced with decoding a complex and

unwritten language with no basic rulebook to reer to and with no obvious

path into it. It would be like hearing the French phrase Qu’est-ce que c’est? or

the first time, without knowing how the words fitted together, simply because

the words themselves had never beore been written down. Bilingual Tangmi-

Nepali speakers were my first point o contact, and my early months in the

field were spent using (and improving) my existing Nepali language skills toask increasingly complex questions on the lines o “In your language, how

would you say ‘that man over there is my mother’s elder brother’?”, to which I

might receive the tired and slightly irritated reply, and then in Tangmi, “I told

you already, he’s not my mother’s elder brother but my mother’s elder sister’s

husband”, ofen suffixed with a sotto voce “this oreign guy learns really slowly”.

Te biggest cognitive challenge as a fieldworker and documenter, however,

lay in having to expand my memory and deepen my powers o recall. So accus-

tomed was I to pen and paper (and increasingly keyboard and screen), thatwhether it be a shopping list or people’s kinship relations, I always needed my

textual crutch. But pen and paper do not work well in the monsoon, certainly

not when walking up a steep mountain ace collecting odder with someone


19/25


who is telling you a story in rapid-fire conversational vernacular speech and

simply cannot understand why you have to stop the whole time to write things

down (and also catch your breath). “Can’t you just remember that?”, Tangmi

riends would ask with incredulity. Invariably my answer was “no”.

Tis indigenous surprise at my limited power o mental recall was height-ened, I believe, because in other ways I “appeared” to be quite clever: afer all,

I could type, take photographs, and draw three dimensional figures. I I could

do all o these things, my Tangmi language teachers wondered aloud, how

on earth could it be that I had orgotten how to remember? Was the kind o

knowledge in which I traded, and over which I had apparent mastery, thereore

substitutive rather than cumulative? In my cognitive world, did I have to eject

“remembering” in order to insert “reading”? As Tangmi research assistants

came to appreciate, when they learned computers and Unicode onts that wereappropriate or their language, one ability did not necessarily have to displace

the other. Tat malaise was a specific eebleness o this particular fieldworker,

and perhaps a more general tendency among others o his kind, whose depen-

dence on written and digital recording devices was so complete that the pro-

cess o committing to paper—documenting—had effectively superseded and

eclipsed my ability to learn by heart.

As my ability in Tangmi improved, Nepal’s civil war took hold o the

villages in which I was living. While lie became uncomortable or me inrural Nepal, it became untenable or my hosts, and I returned to Kathmandu,

transporting our model o village living, as a joint amily, to the city. Although

all the people and characters were the same, my fluency in Tangmi began to

tail off dramatically. Tere was very little that I could communicate about using

Tangmi in the urban world around me. Tangmi was a language entirely ill

adapted to city living, where the mechanisation, electrification and consumer

models o daily lie required a different lexicon—one that was almost exclu-

sively in Nepali and secondarily in English. Even i we choose to reject theimplications o environmental determinism and the thinking o Edward Sapir

and Benjamin Whor as addressed below, it is clear that a language such as

Tangmi requires culture, place, and situatedness to survive and thrive. aken

out o its village context—like a fish out o water—Tangmi was a speech orm

gasping or air.

THE COGNI TIVE WORLD OF THANGMI

Evans and Levinson (, p. ) argue that “the crucial act or understand-

ing the place o language in cognition is diversity”. o that end, I should pro-

vide some examples o such diversity to illustrate the distinctiveness o the


20/25

MARK TURIN

Tangmi language, and the cognitive rames with which I had to contend.

Trough this, we might reflect on whether, at a push, this might be reerred to

as “a/the Tangmi cognitive world”.

In Tangmi, the verb “to be” has a range o different roots, contingent on

the perceived state o permanence o being or whether the speaker has seen theevent with their own eyes and thus verified the occurrence. o be more precise,

Tangmi has no verb “to be” at all, but rather our different verbs that when

clustered together, approximately convey our sense o “being”.

First, there is Tangmi thasa, an apparently permanent state o being, as in

“I am male”. Second, there is Tangmi hoksa, conveying location and less per-

manent experiences o existence, as in “Ram is at home” or “this yak is angry”

(Portuguese and Spanish speakers will naturally think o ser and estar ). Tird,

Tangmi has jasa, to cover general statements o act and opinion, even i thespecifics o a certain case point in the other direction, as in “potatoes are usu-

ally good ( jasa), but this potato is rotten (hoksa)”. Finally, Tangmi has nisa,

which principally means “to see”, but can be used as the verb “to be” when the

noun that it describes is in sight or is witnessable, as in “the ood is (nisa, liter-

ally ‘looks’) tasty” or “elder brother is (nisa) at home (literally: I saw him enter

the house so I know it to be true)”.

Explained like this, it all looks rather obvious, but the challenge is in the

decoding. In particular, since mother tongue monolingual fluency is a com-plete and all immersive cognitive experience, usually resisting exegesis rom

the inside (and sometimes even rom the outside), there’s no point in asking

abstract questions along the lines o “would you please explicate the distinction

between the copula hoksa and thasa in this verbal scenario?” Rather, the lin-

guistic fieldworker must work as a code-breaker, comparing and contrasting,

learning by doing (and undoing), to tease out a rame that translates, however

imperectly, into something that he can understand, an analytical distinction

o which he can conceive.I describe this process to students as analogous to being a car mechanic

(with our colleagues in generative linguists surely the system engineers, some

with a sideline in bodywork design): one must disassemble the whole vehicle,

piece by piece, and then reassemble it, and then ensure that it still works. Put

that piston (or morpheme) in the wrong place, and it backfires (or you acci-

dentally insult an old man—as I did). Te work is essentially cyclical: the aim is

to reduce to the component parts and then rebuild, elegantly, parsimoniously,

and transparently. Te aim is not to improve.Tangmi verbs o motion verbs vary by angle o inclination, so that “to

come (up a hill)” is a completely different and unrelated verb stem rom

“to come (down the slope)”. Te verbs are wangsa and yusa, respectively.


21/25


Additionally, or those occasions that one comes rom the same level or around

a natural obstacle, Tangmi boasts kyelsa; while rasa is reserved or those spe-

cial cases in which someone is coming rom an unspecified or unknown direc-

tion. In short, our Tangmi verbs to cover the unctional load “to come”. It is

inconceivable that a native speaker would conuse these terms, illustrating justhow deeply the local geography and mountainous topography are etched into

the language. Here we have a case o language mirroring ecology, or perhaps

ecology could be thought o as reflecting the linguistic and cultural orms o a

people inhabiting a specific topographical niche.

Te Tangmi kinship system, which I thought I had finally mastered afer

many complex diagrams—eight different uncles and aunts depending on

whether they are older or younger than parents, and differentiated between

consanguinal (blood) relatives and affinal (those who are married in)—actu-ally makes a distinction or gender o speaker, which I did not realise until

I started working with a local woman who, as a “eminine speaker”, turned

my whole paradigm inside out. Spatial and temporal deixis is similarly highly

elaborate in Tangmi, with many subtle divisions and slices between “here”

and “there”, not to mention discrete and precise lexical elements or up to five

years in the past and similarly five years in the uture. My trilingual glossary

was quickly filling up with poor descriptive glosses, along the lines o “the year

afer the year afer next”, and so on.Te Tangmi lexicon itsel is rather compact, restrained even, with just a

ew thousand words, and not always ones that we would expect. While there

are no indigenous Tangmi terms or village, table, lef or right (these are

all borrowed rom Nepali, the national language, which is increasingly well

understood), there are specific verbs to mean “to be exhausted by sitting in

the sun all day” and “to be inested with lice”, as well as precise nouns to

describe the edible parts o certain leaves or particularly chewy meat that gets

stuck in one’s teeth. In other words, the lexical inventory o Tangmi reflectsthose things that are culturally salient and meaningul to its speakers. How

ar and how hard, though, we may push Sapir-Whor beore becoming circu-

lar and sel-deeating remains up or discussion. While it is beyond doubt—to

me, at least—that something about the structure, eatures, and lexical inven-

tory o a language impacts and influences the ways in which its speakers

conceptualize their world, we must be very wary o ecological determinism

and glorified primitivism. Influence and co-occurrence are not the same as

causality, and in the case o language and culture, the direction o that causal-ity remains hotly debated. Cognitive research and psycholinguistics are tak-

ing the discussion orward in exciting and innovative ways, unearthing old

punching bags like Berlin and Kay’s Basic Color erms rom , and using


22/25

MARK TURIN

these studies to pose new questions. Experimental rigour combined with ana-

lytic nuance may help to address questions that have dogged linguistics or

the best part o a century.

For me, though, learning Tangmi was a orm o cipher, albeit in cogni-

tive isolation: a voyage o incredible excitement, intellectual stimulation, andmental exploration, exploding my narrow expectations o what a language

could do, what it could eel like, and how it could unction. As the ew illustra-

tions above show, conceptual, social and ecological worlds open up when you

come to understand a language vastly different rom your own. Studying or

documenting such a speech orm is one thing, trying to actually speak it was

something else again.

ONLY CONNE CT…

Tere are still some monolingual English speakers who would have us believe

that linguistic diversity is incompatible with the inexorable progress that

requires linguistic interoperability and smooth international communication

across national boundaries. But we know that this is not the case, particularly

in parts o the world where many people are still unctionally plurilingual,

speaking an ethnic or tribal mother tongue inside the home, a different lan-

guage in the local market town, conversing in the national language at schoolor in dealings with the administration, and ofen using an international lan-

guage (or two) in dealings with the outside world. Te monolingualism o

much o the First World (and particularly its Anglo-Saxon segments) remains

as provincial as it is historically anomalous.

While the origin o the extraordinary diversity o human languages is

intertwined with the evolution o cognition and culture, the spread o modern

language amilies is a direct and more mechanical result o historical popula-

tion movements, migrations across continents, and the colonisation o newgeographical and environmental zones. A consequence o this peopling o the

planet is that human languages are not evenly distributed: there are relatively

ew in Europe compared to an abundance in the Pacific. Te Himalayan region

is home to great linguistic diversity, in part because the mountains have in the

past been a natural barrier to mobility and communication.

Recent scholarship on language endangerment now points to an intrigu-

ing correlation: language diversity appears to be inversely related to latitude,

and areas rich in languages also tend to be rich in ecology and species. Bothbiodiversity and linguistic diversity are concentrated between the tropics

and in inaccessible environments, such as the Himalayas, while diversity o

all orms tails off in deserts. Around the world then, there is a high level o


23/25


co-occurrence o flora, auna, and languages, and humid tropical climates

as well as orested areas are especially avourable to biological and linguistic

diversification.

Unlike colonial-era anthropologists, some o whom were conscripted to

prove that indigenous peoples and their cultures in Arica and Asia were at alower stage o evolutionary development than imperial, Western industrialised

peoples, linguists at that time were aced with a great deal o data which indi-

cated the opposite. Early missionary linguists were surprised by the complex-

ity o unwritten ethnic languages spoken by only a ew thousand members, a

complexity which stood in sharp contrast to the apparently unelaborate mate-

rial culture (simple tools, weapons, houses, and clothing) that some o these

communities possessed. An unexpected question began to emerge in the colo-

nial mind: what would it mean i an inverse relationship existed between thedegree o material complexity o a culture and the grammatical complexity o

its language? In other words, the simpler the culture, the more elaborate and

sophisticated the grammar o the speech orm used by its members. And then

what o the reverse: the more elaborate and complex a culture (the summit o

which would have been the colonising nation, o course) the simpler that the

grammar o its language would be?

Tis dawning realisation by many early linguists flew in the ace o con-

temporary and accepted wisdom about the evolutionary nature o world his-tory, which had elevated Western Europe to the pinnacle o all achievement.

Linguists were returning rom the field with accounts o extremely complex

verbal agreement systems, huge numbers o numeral classifiers, scores o di-

erent pronouns and nouns, and incredible lexical variation or terms that

were simple in English. Such languages appeared to be untranslatable. At the

same time, then, that s-era ethnographic documentaries aired on the

were talking o “primitive” and “simple” cultures, linguists were exploring and

describing the complexity o the languages that they were encountering. Fromits very beginning, I would argue, descriptive field linguistics emerged as a

humanising and equalising orce.

While the oppositions articulated above must not be given too much

traction—they are over-simplifications or the purpose o the argument,

o course—they serve as interesting tools to think with. Regrettably, such

dualistic colonial oppositions endure to this day, continuing to inorm incor-

rectly held but popular belies that small speech communities necessarily

speak simple dialects, while larger speech communities converse in complexlanguages. Tere is simply no correlation between number o speakers and

linguistic complexity, either way, and the search or such oppositions must be

ended decisively.


24/25

MARK TURIN

Certain schools o Buddhism talk o “aming the Monkey Mind” by which

they mean making sense o and controlling the unsettled, restless, capricious,

whimsical, anciul, inconstant, conused, indecisive and uncontrollable

aspects o our humanity.

Te eye can see, but cannot see itsel …

Te fire can burn, but cannot burn itsel …

How can the mind think that it can change its mind …?

As we reflect on the nature o human cognition, and consider the bor-

ders o our own reason, maybe the rontiers o the human condition are really

what we should be concerned about. Is what separates us rom other primates

that they have natural and wild minds, while we have domesticated and tamedours? Nature versus culture, all over again? Or is what makes us human rather

our monstrous cognitive capacity that in turn resulted in an explosion o lin-

guistic orms, a diversity unrecorded in any other species. I language—in all

o its maniestations—lies at the core o what makes us human, then we sim-

ply cannot afford to stand by and do nothing as the diversity o our cognitive

capacity—these creative articulations o our shared humanity—slips through

our fingers into oblivion.

REFERENCES

, G. J. (ed.) (), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, Philadelphia,

University o Pennsylvania Press.

, R. (), “Te ormation o the concept o nation-state in Nepal”. In C. J. Fuller,

J. Spencer (eds.), Te Conditions of Listening: Essays on Religion History and Politics in South

Asia, Delhi, Oxord University Press, pp. -.

, L.-J. (), Linguistique et colonialisme, petit traité de glottophagie, Paris, Payot.

, M. C. (), Te Recursive Mind: Te Origins of Human Language, Tought,

and Civilization: Te Origins of Human Tought, Language, and Civilization, New Jersey,

Princeton University Press.

, L. M., , J. (), “Speakers and language documentation”. In P. K. Austin,

J. Sallabank (eds.), Te Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, pp. -.

, N., , S. (), “Te myth o language universals: Language diversity and its

importance or cognitive science”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (), pp. -., D. L. (), “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another

look at the design eatures o human language”. Current Anthropology, (), pp. -

.


25/25


, D. L. (), Don’t Sleep, Tere are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle,

New York, Pantheon Books.

, I. (), Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, - ,

Durham, Duke University Press.

, R. (), “Data – but data rom what?”. Language Documentation and Description, ,

pp. -.

, M. (), “Documenting ceremonial dialogues: an in vitro perormance and the

problem o textualization”. Language Documentation and Description, , pp. -.

, J. (), Myth, Ritual and the Oral , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

, A. (), “Te Politics o A-Political Linguistics: Linguists and Linguicide”.

In R. Phillipson (ed.), Rights to Language: Equity, Power, and Education: Celebrating the th

Birthday of ove Skutnabb-Kangas, Mahwah, , L. Erlbaum Associates, pp. -.

, E. (), Endangered Languages: A Special Report , National Science Foundation,

http://www.ns.gov/news/special_reports/linguistics/endangered.jsp

, K. A. (), Corporate Memory: Records and Information Management in the Knowl-edge Age, Munich, K.G. Saur.

, K. A., , H. F. (), Document Management: New echnologies for the Infor-

mation Services Manager , London, Bowker-Saur.

, C. (), Te Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger: Context and Process,

Cambridge, World Oral Literature Project Occasional Paper .

, W. (), Orality and Literacy: Te echnologizing of the Word , London & New York,

Methuen.

, S. (), Te Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power

in Premodern India, Berkeley, University o Caliornia Press.

, A. (ed.) (), Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, Ann Arbour, University o

Michigan Press.

, J. B. (), Linguicide, Winnipeg, Ukrainian echnological University.

, M. (), “Born archival: Te ebb and flow o digital documents rom the field”. History

and Anthropology , (), pp. -.

, M. () A Grammar of the Tangmi Language with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to

the Speakers and their Culture, Dissertation, Leiden University.

, M., , B. B. (), Nepali – Tami – English Dictionary , Kathmandu Martin

Chautari.

, (), Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger , Paris, .

Received --. Accepted or publication --.

, M. (), “Voices o vanishing worlds: Endangered languages, orality, and cognition”.

Análise Social ( º) pp

Date post:	06-Jul-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	georgeperkins
View:	220 times
Download:	0 times