A language documentation perspective: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)

Abstract

This commentary on Kidd and Garcia takes a language documentation perspective on diversifying language acquisition research. Following a brief summary of relevant research in Papuan languages, it sketches out current developments to extend into child language documentation. It is argued that these developments constitute a unique opportunity to engage with on-going discussions on best practice in order to ensure that the resulting documentations are of use to both fields: language documentation and language acquisition.

Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline

“…We agree that careful, typologically-informed crosslinguistic comparisons are crucial to scientific progress in the field (see next section), but we must not lose sight of the cultural importance of a language to its community. There are multiple beneficiaries of our work, and once we see language as a crucial determinant of identity, wellbeing and societal participation (among other things), in addition to being a repository of cultural knowledge (as understood in Language Documentation, Hellwig, 2022), the scientific value of a language, for want of a better term, is only one consideration when deciding on where to direct our research efforts. In the current United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Indigenous Languages Decade (2022-2032), our field can strive to play an important role in the preservation, revitalisation and support of Indigenous languages worldwide (https://en.unesco.org/idil2022-2032).…”

“…As we pointed out in our target article, an important first step in an understudied language would be to collect naturalistic data because it allows the simultaneous observation of many variables in situ. Here, we recommend language documentation approaches to acquisition as a first step (Hellwig, 2022;Hellwig et al, 2021;Pye, 2021Pye, , 2022, with the hope that some sketch corpora may evolve into bigger projects (Vihman, 2022). Comparable elicited data derived from materials adapted to a language in a culturally sensitive way, such that they yield externally valid data, are also important (e.g.…”

“…Several commentators (Arunachalam et al, 2022; de León, 2022; Hellwig, 2022; Henke, 2022; Lillo-Martin & Hochgesang, 2022; Slobin, 2022) noted there is published data on acquisition in languages not found in the four journals we surveyed, which would increase the number of languages for which we have data, a point on which we only briefly touched. This is very true.…”

“…The commentaries by Berman (2022), Edward (2022), Hellwig (2022), de León (2022), Lillo-Martin and Hochgesang (2022), Sagna et al (2022) and Sultana (2022) all discussed specific issues concerning languages or language families they have worked on, revealing the rich insights we gain when we study what Pye (2022) calls ‘the dark matter of the linguistic universe’ (p. 799). Together these commentaries highlight two crucial variables we are in danger of taking for granted when we limit ourselves to English and a handful of other Indo-European languages: the language environment (see also Foushee & Casillas, 2022) and linguistic diversity.…”

Archiving of Indigenous Languages with Specific Reference to IsiXhosa

“…Therefore, a scholarly discourse that intends to engage and capture issues concerning indigenous South African languages' archiving is an area that requires scholarly attention. In actuality, the reason for the lack of archiving of indigenous South African languages centres on the fact that these languages have been undervalued by colonial forces that sought to advance exclusion from controlling and semi-controlling domains, namely education, governance, law and legislation, economics and trade, and international systems of communications (Hellwig 2022).…”