Colette Grinevald, member of the Sorosoro Scientific Board and Harvard Ph.D. in linguistics, has worked in USA as a linguist for nearly thirty years. She is now a professor at the university of Lyon 2 (France) and at the CNRS-based language dynamics laboratory (« Dynamique du Langage »), and most of all, she’s a reference and a pioneer in the field of endangered languages description. Specializing in the languages of Latin America, she is highly committed to the defense and promotion of endangered languages and the people who speak them.

Latest of the “Faits de Langues” series, Linguistique de Terrain sur les Langues en Danger was recently published under her direction and that of Michel Bert, including a preface by Claude Hagège.

Colette, endangered language description and documentation are quite a new discipline in linguistics, and were only recently recognized as such…

Linguists’ concerns over endangered languages are quite recent indeed, and were partly modeled on biologists’ concerns over biological diversity.

It developed as a subdiscipline of linguistics near the end of the 20th century, and then went global at the beginning of the 21st. Only then did it develop in France as an actual academic discipline.

Sébastien Bodinga-bwa-Bodinga and linguist Lolke van der Veen during the official handing-over of the Geviya-Français dictionary to the Eviya community, Gabon.

What made you become aware of these issues?

Well, it sort of happened by accident when I ended up having to face this problem in the field. Having worked on a Mayan language in Guatemala during the 70s and developed my own way of approaching a language of oral tradition, I was called on to work on another Amerindian language in the 80s, this time in Nicaragua. The very point was to help a linguistic community save their language, Rama, which counted only very few speakers left. New policies granting recognition to all the languages of the region had just been voted, and language was becoming a growing concern for the Rama ethnic group…

That’s how it all started. Then in the 90s I committed myself to develop the discipline along with a handful of other linguists established in USA.

These are the things you wanted to talk about in your book?

Nowadays a lot has been published on the question of endangered languages and the technological and linguistic aspects of our work, but none of these ever addressed the human and methodological perspective, which is what we’re doing here. We wanted to collect accounts that revealed what things were like backstage of the actual field work, and produce a collective work gathering both young PhD students and senior professionals with worldwide reputation, including some with over 30 or 40 years of experience in the field.

The first part is an introduction to the discipline of endangered languages as it has recently developed within the field of linguistics. It shines a light, among others, on the peculiar working relationship that may (or may not) grow between the linguists and the speakers of the languages involved. The second part takes the reader around the world through a number of accounts from the field in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. This whole section is an inside view on the nature of our work in situ, sometimes including personal accounts of the quality of the human relationships that hold everything together.

Informant Mzee D. in a Simákonde language speaking Mozambican community, Tanzania. Photo Sophie Manus, 2004.

If you had to choose one particular article or subject from this book, which one would it be, and why?

I think the main point of this collection in the great variety of linguistic situations, linguists and projects it intends to cover.

For instance, you’ll learn about the extreme situation of some of the languages of the US west coast, in Oregon and California. Some of the people there have an amazing attachment to their « heritage » language, which they ask linguists to record when they’re the last ones to speak it. When it is no longer spoken, they ask linguists to « bring it back » to them, by teaching them whatever is known of the language thanks to documentation dating back to the last century!

In contrast the book includes chapters on the still-vivacious languages of South American groups, among which a nomadic group of the Colombian Amazon region, the Yuhup, or another one, in Ecuador, who has wished to handle itself the documentation of its own language, Tsafiki,

I trust readers will also be fascinated to learn about “whistled languages”, many of which weren’t even documented or known, and all of which, sadly, are now highly endangered, in Greece, Turkey or Mexico for instance.

And then there’s this surprising chapter about Franco-Provençal, a regional language that France hasn’t officially recognized yet, though it was recently recognized by the French Rhône Alpes region where our research lab is located.

The book covers Africa, Asia, America, etc. Yet surprisingly, all the authors here are Western linguists… Where are the African, Asian, or American Indian linguists?

Endangered languages usually mean very marginalized populations, aged speakers, and absence of younger speakers. In such circumstances, very few people happen to be literate, and besides, the level of education rarely exceeds the first years of primary school. Our work then is to train as many members of the community as possible, so they can take part in the documentation of the language by learning how to transcribe or translate the recordings. Become actual linguists is a whole other story…

That being said, the book is truly speaker-oriented; as a tribute, a way to show how those who work with the linguists are often « natural linguists » themselves. Among contributors is the case of this native speaker of a language of Senegal, who reports that by overhearing our discussions at the DDL lab in Lyon, he found out much to his grief that his own language was endangered, which he was later able to confirm when he returned in the field for his thesis.

Angela teaching Rama, Nicaragua. Photo Colette Grinevald.

You’re committed to the populations whose languages you study, way beyond the strictly linguistic aspect of your work. What makes you choose to do so, while other researchers tend to stand back?

That probably has to do with my personality! To me, field linguistics have always been a way of living, an excuse to encounter the languages I’m fascinated with, and listen to people speak and think out loud in such a different way than I do. I like human beings more than I like machines; I love the languages that I find beautifully complex and unusual. Plus, all I’ve done is listening to the people I’ve worked with, having them speak, and doing my best to offer what they expected in return of what they offered.

Thus I belong to a growing movement among linguists who work on endangered languages known as research-action, a movement that meets the demands of the linguistic communities we work for.

Colette Grinevald among Rama speakers in Nicaragua.

How do you envision the future of the discipline?

Today there’s a discipline of Endangered Languages as such, and global awareness of these issues is also growing.

What we need now is more cross-interdisciplinary approach to our work, by gathering linguists and speakers of the communities as well as NGOs and audiovisual professionals for high quality documentation, like Sorosoro does for instance.

Also, reaching back to one of your previous questions, there’s an emergency to train linguists from the countries involved, and even from the communities themselves, anytime that appears possible. The populations of minority languages are still widely discriminated, unfortunately. But we must really reach for linguistic documentation and description to be handled by community members themselves.

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