Researchers set off from Cologne to the most remote areas of the world to research previously undescribed languages. When not enough people who speak the language are left, the cultural and historical memory of the language community can be lost.

Mathias Martin 

The old man is famous in the village for his stories. Especially the children love visiting him to listen to his tales. This time, a particularly large number of villagers have turned up and his house is becoming increasingly crowded. That is because the storyteller is not alone: Maria Bardají is sitting across from him with a video camera and microphone. Everyone is curious to find out what she is up to in the remote village of Gio in the north of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where strangers usually never find their way by accident. Then the old man begins to talk in Totoli, the traditional language of the Tolitoli Regency. Dr. Maria Bardají starts her recording.

The linguist and has already studied the Totoli language, which is one of the Austronesian languages, in her doctoral thesis at the Institute of Linguistics. With around 1,200 mostly very small language communities, the Austronesian languages are one of the largest language families in the world. They are spread over a region between Madagascar in the west to the Easter Islands in the east. 

When languages disappear

As a field researcher, Maria Bardají makes sound or video recordings on site on various occasions in order to capture the language she is analysing in its own context. If a language is little known, field researchers first try to ask for terms and then create a word list. In her research, however, Bardají can build on the work of her former doctoral thesis advisor Professor Dr Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, director of the Institute of Linguistics. Himmelmann visited the Tolitoli Regency as a postdoc in 1988 and carried out the first major data collection on Totoli. “On my first visit to Tolitoli, there were still an estimated 20,000 residents who spoke Totoli in their everyday lives. Their numbers have now dwindled to less than 5,000. Today, Totoli is spoken almost exclusively by older people,” said Himmelmann. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to find people with good language skills who can support our research work.”

Maria Bardají was lucky. During one of her visits to Tolitoli, she discovered the small village of Gio – where the storyteller lives – by chance. What’s special about it: It is the only village where Totoli is still spoken in everyday family life. In the other villages in the district, the parents speak Indonesian with their children. “If a language like Totoli is no longer passed on, it dies out. And with the loss of language, a piece of identity and culture is always lost, too,” said Bardají.

Dr Claudia Wegener, who also conducts research at the Institute of Linguistics, can confirm this: “In everyday life, practising multilingualism in the family is often difficult. It is challenging and requires a lot of discipline.” Wegener conducts research e.g. on Savosavo. The language is not an Austronesian language, but a Papuan language spoken on the small Solomon Island of Savo. The island, which is only six kilometres in diameter, is home to around 3,500 inhabitants, many of whom still speak Savosavo. However, Savosavo is considered a very difficult language for non-native speakers to learn. The inhabitants therefore increasingly speak Solomon Islands Pijin, an English-based creole language spoken by most inhabitants of the Solomon Islands, or one of the Austronesian languages, which are considered easier to learn.

Minority languages such as Totoli and Savosavo are particularly endangered. There are currently around 7,000 languages in the world, a third of which will become extinct in the next few decades according to the Society for Endangered Languages (Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Sprachen e.V.). The researchers at the Institute of Linguistics want to contribute to helping small language communities preserve their languages. However, the preservation of endangered languages is not an end in itself. When a language disappears, it is not just the words that are lost, but the entire cultural and historical ‘memory’ of the language community. Because every language has its own way of thinking and understanding the world. And it’s not just remote places like Sulawesi or the Solomon Islands that are affected. Also in Europe, many languages are threatened, including Breton, Sorbian or Irish.

Creating trust

There are seventy Austronesian languages in the Solomon Islands, but only four Papuan languages, including Savosavo. This diversity is the result of various population migrations over a period of several millennia. Around 18,000 to 25,000 years ago, Papuan speakers were the first to arrive in the region; 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, Austronesian-speaking seafarers came to the Solomon Islands from the south-east and north-west. As a result, only four Papuan languages remain, which have very few similarities amongst each other.

This is a particular challenge for Claudia Wegener, as linguists often gain new insights by comparing different languages which are spoken in the same region. However, unlike Austronesian languages, the four Papuan languages have so little in common that it is not possible to draw conclusions from one language to another. “There is no closely related language where I could look at material to derive more specific hypotheses for the Savosavo language. I have to start at the very beginning: I have to capture the phonology, determine the word structure and then find out what the individual units with independent meaning are,” explained the linguist.

First of all, Wegener and her colleagues have to reach their respective destinations. This can be a journey of several days in the case of remote locations. They then try to make contact with people from the small language communities. “In field research, we are in the process of transforming from a ‘white researcher comes, collects data and goes home’ model to a participatory organization of this kind of research,” explained institute director Himmelmann. “You negotiate with the language communities about what their interests are, whether they even want someone to research their languages and how they want to use the results for themselves.” Himmelmann was an early advocate of language researchers working as closely as possible with locals. The local contact persons establish trust with the speakers, accompany the researchers on their visits, support them in recording and often even in documenting and analysing the data.

Without this local support, linguistic field research would hardly be possible. This is because it is often difficult for local people to understand what the researchers are up to and that language research is different from language learning. “We have to pay particular attention to hierarchies and rules of courtesy when we visit families. Who do I talk to first? Is it okay for the person that I am visiting them now? Or do they really not have time and only spoke to me out of politeness?” Maria Bardají also asks herself such questions. During her field research on Sulawesi, she can discuss them with Winarno and Datra, who speak Totoli and have already contributed to various university projects on site.

Linguistic field research needs one thing above all: a lot of time. During her visitis to Savo, Claudia Wegener often hears “Memere pika late,” literally translated: “Hold (late) a little bit of belly (pika).” This means that, as a visitor, she should first have a drink and a snack, in other words take her time. It can sometimes take two or three hours before Wegener can begin her actual recordings of the Savosavo language. Before that, they eat and talk a lot in Savosavo or Solomon Islands Pijin. Claudia Wegener is aware of her privileged position as a western researcher when visiting the families. “I try to give something back to them and also bring food that people want. This is often more culturally appropriate than paying money, which can easily be perceived as an insult.”

Protecting languages

The researchers’ aim is that the small language communities also benefit from their visits. “When we, as researchers from Europe, visit small language communities in other parts of the world, this can have a symbolic effect and be perceived by the locals as a special appreciation of their language,” said Bardají. “Our visits gets people talking about their language and thinking about why we are interested in it.”

The documentation of the recorded languages is of central importance. The audio and video recordings are transcribed on site by the researchers together with the contact persons and other local staff. Back in Germany, the material is analysed further using software. If available, digital language sources such as videos and websites are also included - piling up to material for many years of future research. Finally, the researchers make their research results and the collected data available in digital language archives, for example in the Language Archive Cologne or in the DOBES language archive, which is hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. “The information in the archives can be used to create dictionaries and teaching materials, among other thigs,” said Himmelmann. “If fewer people speak a language, then at least its vocabulary and language structure can be documented.” The language archives can also be used by the locals. For users who do not have much experience with computers, however, the inhibition threshold for working with the language archives is high. Special, low-threshold access points are currently being developed.

Himmelmann has been on field research in Indonesia again since mid-August. This time it took him to West Papua, where he is researching languages together with scholars and students from the local Universitas Papua and offering a training and support programme in language documentation for local people. The researchers have a total of almost three hundred languages to document - a task that will take decades. Some languages will probably not make it. They will have disappeared before they can be recorded, analysed and documented.
 

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The Society for Endangered Languages is a non-profit organization based at the University of Cologne
The Language Archive Cologne is currently under construction

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Presentation of the Leo Spitzer Prize 2017 to Professor Himmelmann