Documenting and Maintaining Languages

Linguists have long sought to describe unfamiliar languages.  That work has taken on new urgency, though, as more and more languages become endangered.  Students and faculty at William and Mary have responded by making language documentation a central part of the undergraduate curriculum.

Linguistics majors generally start with a course called Study of Language. That course gives them the background needed for Phonetics and Phonology, Generative Syntax, and Language Patterns.  Knowledge in those courses is then put to use in a course called Descriptive Linguistics.  In Descriptive Linguistics, twelve students and a faculty member work with a native speaker of another language to discover the basic structure of that language.  Recent classes have focused on Tongan, Georgian, Farsi, and Amharic, and by studying those languages, students have discovered the challenges and rewards of working directly with speakers.

Several students have continued their research after Descriptive Linguistics.  Some have done Honors theses on the syntactic and discourse elements of Tagalog and Tongan, with data collected from speakers living in the Williamsburg area; others have gathered data during study abroad in Kenya, Indonesia, and China.  Associate Professor Jack Martin has also taken students to Louisiana, Florida, and Oklahoma to assist several American Indian tribes in the South in documenting and maintaining their languages.

Several students have built on their experiences at William and Mary to do graduate work in language documentation. Randi Tucker ('06) and Jennifer Wilson ('08) are currently students at SUNY Buffalo.  Emerson Odango ('05), who spent the last two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia, is now in the PhD program in Documenting and Preserving Language at the University of Hawaii.  Stephanie Hasselbacher ('04) received a Masters degree in the Endangered Language program at the School of Oriental and Asiatic Studies in London before returning to William and Mary to continue work on endangered languages in the PhD program in Anthropology.

Collaborative learning characterizes much of the undergraduate experience at William and Mary, and that feature is seen clearly in the Linguistics major and its emphasis on language documentation and maintenance.