Lectures on Endangered Languages: 2--From Kyoto Conference 2000, and: Languages of the North Pacific Rim (review)

The Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim (ELPR) project of the faculty of Osaka Gakuin University in Japan has been providing leadership in language documentation and preservation. Funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture, and Technology and led by Osahito Miyaoka, the ELPR project runs from 1999 to 2003 and involves nearly 200 researchers who are sorting materials from earlier work; conducting new fieldwork and analysis; publishing dictionaries, grammars, and textbooks; and developing databases. Geographically, the project focuses on the North Pacific Rim, the South Pacific Rim and the Pacific, East and Southeast Asia, and Japan, and the two books considered here illustrate some of the work being produced by the ELPR project.

The first consists of papers and commentaries from the International Conference on Endangered Languages held in November of 2000 in Kyoto, the first ever large conference on endangered languages held in Japan. Collected here are papers by researchers from Australia, Chile, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, the UK, and the US. The collection includes contributions by Michael E. Krauss, Barbara F. Grimes, Willem F. H. Adelaar, Matthias Brenzinger, Stephen Wurm, David Bradley, Victor Golla, Yukio Uemura, A. E. Kibrik, Nelson Aguilera A, José Tonko P, Tapani Salminen, Tasaku Tsunoda, Marie-Claude Mattei Muller, Akira Yamamoto, Nicholas Ostler, Terrence Kaufman, and Colette Grinevald. The papers range from those which describe language endangerment situations and explicate the need to document threatened languages to ones which discuss methodologies for documentation and strategies for language revitalization to ones which discuss projects underway in various parts of the world. Topics include the severity of mass language extinction, its causes in globalization, language attitudes and other factors, large and small-scale documentation, and accounts of particular languages such as the Ryukuan languages in Japan, Alutor and Forest Nenets in Russia, and Kawesqar and Yaghan in Chile. Most papers are followed by a commentary or response by one or two of the other participants.

The second volume consists of eight analytical works on languages of Russia, Alaska, and Canada. These range from a short report on Shamanic autobiographical texts in the Tungusic language Udehe (by Toshiro Tsumagiri) and a brief note on Korak writing (by Alevita Zhukova) to longer reports dealing with basic vocabulary in Kolyma Yukaghir (by Fubito Endo), noun incorporation in Koryak (by Megumi Kurebito), affixes in Chukchi (by Tokusu Kurebito), classifiers in Skidegate Haida (by Hirofumi Hori) and suffixes in Sliammon Salish (by Honoré Watanabe). The longest contribution to the volume (85–155) is a substantial grammar fragment for Central Alaskan Yupik provided by Osahito Miyaoka.

Taken together, these two volumes give a nice sense of the range of work being done in the ELPR project. Other reports, many of which are published both in Japanese and in English, include work on minority languages of East and Southeast Asia, work on Toda vocabulary, on the prosody of endangered dialects in Japan, on Hualapai grammar, and on folktales, legends, and fairy tales by speakers of Koryak, Nanay, Sakhalin Ainu, Saru Ainu, and Nivkh. For those who work to preserve and revive languages, these volumes (along with other recent work such as Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale’s The green book of language revitalization in practice (San Diego: Academic Press, 2001) and Nicholas Ostler’s Endangered languages and literacy 2000 (Bath: Foundation for Endangered...