Language Documentation in Diaspora Communities

Kaufman, Daniel; Perlin, Ross

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190610029.013.20

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The deconstructivist approach has provided important insight into linguistic marginalization because, as migrants move throughout different institutionalized sites of power, their language use is evaluated through competing ideologies that compound their exclusion (Duchêne et al 2013). A complementary perspective could address the fact that the endangerment of under‐documented languages intersects with migration (Kaufman and Perlin 2018), and mobile communities often reveal layered forms of linguistic diversity that may be obscured in analyses of public settings such as markets and workplaces. Autobiographical narrative allows speakers to explicate metalinguistic and metapragmatic associations, revealing the potential for language recognition to reverse language shift.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topolects in Motion: Narrative Possibilities for Language Vitality among Mobile Chinese‐Canadians

Ward

Chow

2022

J Linguistic Anthropol

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This article examines the language autobiographies of 12 Chinese-Canadians to address how topolects (Ch. fangyan)-spoken language varieties marking place-based belongingformulate identity once removed from their original places. We found that narrators located topolects in their pasts and homelands, while associating standard Mandarin with mobility and the future. We argue that, by associating topolects and standard Mandarin with contrasting times and places, narrators reformatted prevailing standard language ideologies from mainland China to rationalize experiences of linguistic exclusion. Despite pressures for language standardization, the narrative grounding of topolects in kinship chronotopes offers possibilities for maintaining diverse Chinese languages amidst mobility. [Chinese languages, language and mobility, language autobiographies, language standardization, language vitality]

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topolects in Motion: Narrative Possibilities for Language Vitality among Mobile Chinese‐Canadians

Ward

Chow

2022

J Linguistic Anthropol

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“…In observing three primary linguistic spaces, I do not seek to confine a given language to one of the three spaces. Local languages have diasporas, such as the Nahuatl, Quechua and Hawaiian communities in New York (Kaufman and Perlin, 2018). Regional spoken varieties of a single language may have markedly different functions in different culture areas, e.g.…”

Section: A Multipolar Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local Languages, Third Spaces, and other High-Resource Scenarios

Bird¹

2022

Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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How can language technology address the diverse situations of the world's languages? In one view, languages exist on a resource continuum and the challenge is to scale existing solutions, bringing under-resourced languages into the high-resource world. In another view, presented here, the world's language ecology includes standardised languages, local languages, and contact languages. These are often subsumed under the label of 'under-resourced languages' even though they have distinct functions and prospects. I explore this position and propose some ecologically-aware language technology agendas.

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“…They could be students who meet the visiting linguist in the provincial capital and escort her to the village. They might have moved from the ancestral homeland to a major city where they participate in urban fieldwork (Kaufman and Perlin 2018). Whatever the situation, these people may be able to provide transcriptions, perhaps by adapting the orthography of another language (Figure 4).…”

Section: Working With Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sparse Transcription

Bird

2021

Computational Linguistics

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The transcription bottleneck is often cited as a major obstacle for efforts to document the world's endangered languages and supply them with language technologies. One solution is to extend methods from automatic speech recognition and machine translation, and recruit linguists to provide narrow phonetic transcriptions and sentence-aligned translations. However, I believe that these approaches are not a good fit with the available data and skills, or with long-established practices that are essentially word based. In seeking a more effective approach, I consider a century of transcription practice and a wide range of computational approaches, before proposing a computational model based on spoken term detection which I call “sparse transcription.” This represents a shift away from current assumptions that we transcribe phones, transcribe fully, and transcribe first. Instead, sparse transcription combines the older practice of word-level transcription with interpretive, iterative, and interactive processes which are amenable to wider participation and which open the way to new methods for processing oral languages.

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Language Documentation in Diaspora Communities

Cited by 3 publications

References 2 publications

Topolects in Motion: Narrative Possibilities for Language Vitality among Mobile Chinese‐Canadians

Topolects in Motion: Narrative Possibilities for Language Vitality among Mobile Chinese‐Canadians

Local Languages, Third Spaces, and other High-Resource Scenarios

Sparse Transcription

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