Ethical issues in legacy language resources

Recent Advances in Technologies for Resource Creation and Mobilization in Language Documentation

“…A 2010 special issue of Language & Communication on ethics and linguistic fieldwork aimed to examine the ethical implications of digital methods for language documentation. Among the papers found in this issue are O'Meara & Good (2010), which examines the appropriate use of the legacy materials that are often found in archives; Robinson (2010), which discusses informed consent in communities with little firsthand experience in the implications of putting language data on the Internet; and Debenport (2010), which explores community-specific notions of language ownership as they contrast with non-Indigenous understanding of "universal ownership" (e.g., Hill 2002) of language information in the digital world. 3 A second recent discussion pertains to the role of colonial practices in the development of technology for language reclamation in Indigenous communities, with an aim toward advocating for digital tools that keep decolonization goals at the forefront.…”

Ethics in Linguistics

“…As noted by Samarin (1967, p. 16), "Looking upon linguistics as an 'objective' science does not make us less dependent on human beings for its pursuit, nor does it make us less obligated to use our findings for the satisfaction of their desires." This centering of the human experience has placed the spotlight on fieldwork and direct engagement with both individuals and communities, from whom language data are typically extracted (e.g., Samarin 1967;Labov 1982;Cameron et al 1992;Dorian 1993;Wolfram 1993Wolfram , 1998Rickford 1999;Rice 2006Rice , 2018Warner et al 2007;Czaykowska-Higgins 2009Holton 2009;Leonard & Haynes 2010;O'Meara & Good 2010;De Costa 2015;Rosborough et al 2017;Leonard 2018;Tsikewa 2021). Undergirding these discussions are not only the concerns of community-engaged research, especially in the contexts of less-documented or endangered languages, but also the concerns of positionality, as language workers and researchers increasingly think through the many roles and partnerships that go into the co-creation of knowledge, and how they may or may not fit into a model that assumes a researcher-participant dyad (Bowern 2010).…”

“…There are the ethics of how we talk about, exemplify, and label a language and its users (e.g., why certain tropes are harmful when constructing linguistic examples, what it means to say a language is extinct or that its users are native or nonnative; Macaulay & Brice 1997, Leonard 2011, Cheng et al 2020, Cépeda et al 2021, Tsikewa 2021, Krämer et al 2022. There are ethical considerations relating to inappropriate and offensive commentary in legacy materials with which to contend, alongside questions of intellectual property, rights of access, and dissemination of cultural knowledge beyond the community of origin (e.g., Bowern 2003, Innes 2010, O'Meara & Good 2010, Austin 2017. In teaching, training, and supervision, there are the ethics of building inclusive learning and research cultures; where diversity is built into our practices; where decolonization of theory, method, and curriculum is foregrounded; and where the agenda is inclusive and collaborative rather than top-down (e.g., Gal & Irvine 1995, Charity Hudley et al 2020, DeGraff 2020, Kubota 2020, Calhoun et al 2021, Tsikewa 2021.…”