The hitchhiker's guide to documentation: Communicative practices, cultural competence and proficiency guidelines

• Main Author: Grenoble, Lenore A.
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/25387

Over the last few years I have been working intensely with Arctic indigenous leaders– including linguists, educators and policy makers–to promote indigenous language usage (see arcticlanguages.com). Here as in other indigenous regions, the rhetoric of language endangerment and shift has changed to focus on language vitality, sustainability, and resilience. The people I work with share a vision of promoting language vitality through combining best practices in linguistics and pedagogy. I have been a hitchhiker in the Arctic indigenous language project: I have been working closely with the parties involved, and yet at the same time I am not, and will never be, a community member. In this talk I present a view of linguistic work conducted by linguists who are not permanent members of communities but rather visitors, hitchhikers along for the ride. Although this is not the case for all documentary linguists, it is for a great many of us, those of us who have primary jobs and homes outside of the communities we work with. In this view, as hitchhikers we need to learn the cultural and linguistic practices of speech communities to participate fully in them in order to document them, and we need to create a guide to do it. This is the foundation of community-defined documentation, the hitchhiker’s guide. How can a hitchhiker linguist help support language vitality? Our work to date in assessing the state of Arctic indigenous languages has indicated a real need for better teacher training and for better pedagogical materials and seek best practices in language teaching. Language documentation can be fruitfully informed and even reoriented by guidelines created to teach communicative competence and proficiency in majority languages. Communicative competence includes cultural knowledge and knowledge of social conventions (such as turn-taking mechanisms, appropriateness of nonverbal behavior, and so on). Documentation of communicative practices aimed at teaching such competence results in a rich documentation of language as ...