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On defining language development
Full text linkWith the call for greater language activism, language development is a term that is entering the vocabulary of the language documentation and conservation movement. However, the term has yet to appear in any dictionary of linguistics. This poster reviews its use in the literature and proposes a three-sense definition
A global profile of language development versus language endangerment
No full textOne of the lasting contributions of Fishman’s (1991) seminal book, Reversing Language Shift, is GIDS — the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale. He developed GIDS as a measuring rod for the level of threat to long-term language maintenance. The scale has eight levels (numbered 1 to 8) representing increasing levels of threat or disruption. At level 1, representing virtually no threat, is an official national language with a standardized written form that is used for the business of government and passed to the next generation through a national system of compulsory education. At level 8, representing virtually assured language death, is a language spoken only by the elderly. The six levels in between represent successively fewer functions for language in society as the level of disruption increases. The basic premise of GIDS is that language shift happens as languages lose functions in society. To reverse language shift, the community must engage in language development activities to bring those functions back and to even add new functions that further strengthen the position of the language (like writing and use in formal education).
GIDS is well elaborated on the safe end, but has only two levels on the endangered end. By contrast, the scale developed by the UNESCO Expert Meeting on Safeguarding Endangered Languages (Brenzinger and others 2003) identifies four levels of endangerment, but does not distinguish different levels on the safe end of the scale. We have developed an Extended GIDS (Authors 2010) by harmonizing GIDS, the UNESCO scale, and categories used in Ethnologue (Lewis 2009). The EGIDS is a 13-level scale which recognizes the following levels (from highest to lowest): International, National, Provincial, Wider Communication, Educational, Developing, Vigorous, Threatened, Shifting, Moribund, Nearly Extinct, Dormant, Extinct.
The paper will present the results of our efforts to assign an EGIDS level to every known language enumerated in the ISO 639-3 standard (ISO 2007). Since EGIDS differentiates levels of development as well as levels of endangerment, we can report not only on the extent of language endangerment worldwide, but also on the extent of language development. For instance, we find that of 7,065 known living languages, 12% are dying (8a and lower) and 21% are in trouble (6b and 7). By contrast, 10% have attained the relative safety of institutionalization (4 and higher) and 19% are vigorous with development taking place (5). This leaves 38% that are still vigorous, but not developing (6a)
OLAC: Accessing the world's language resources
Full text linkLanguage resources are the bread and butter of language documentation and linguistic investigation. They include the primary objects of study such as texts and recordings, the outputs of research such as dictionaries and grammars, and the enabling technologies such as software tools and interchange standards. Increasingly, these resources are maintained and distributed in digital form. Searching on the web for language resources in many languages is a hit-and-miss affair for three reasons: (i) resources are housed in archives that have never put their catalog online, (ii) resources are exposed online but are hidden behind form-based interfaces such that search engines cannot find them, or (iii) resources are exposed to online search engines but they are described in ad hoc ways so that searches do not retrieve desired results with precision. The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is addressing these problems by building on digital library standards to provide a standard format for describing language resources, which makes use of standardized identifiers for languages, linguistic data types, and other things of particular interest to linguists. For instance, all resources from all archives that are in or about the same language use the same three-letter language code from the ISO 639-3 standard. OLAC also provides a portal that permits users to simultaneously query the holdings of the three dozen participating language archives in a single search. Since resource description uses precise language identifiers, a search for a particular language return all and only the relevant resources. However, the current usage and coverage of OLAC is only the tip of the iceberg. Many more linguists should be using it to find many more resources. This paper describes research that is being done to make language resources maximally accessible to linguists. We describe new methods for greatly improving search access to archived language resources, new services that encourage language archives to use best common practices to produce resource descriptions that are maximally useful for searching, and new data providers that use digital library services and web-mining technologies to find language resources in the library, institutional repository, and web domains
Rating the vitality of sign languages
Full text linkThe Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS, Authors 2010), based on Fishman’s (1991) earlier GIDS, was developed with spoken languages in mind. As such, some wording and criteria in it do not apply easily to signed languages, reflecting the fact that signed languages have not figured prominently in the literature on language endangerment. In this paper, we propose a modification and refinement of EGIDS that is equally applicable to signed and spoken languages.
Some modifications are trivial, such as replacing “speakers” with “users” or “speakers/signers”. Since transmission of sign languages is usually not from parent to child (a relatively small proportion of deaf children have parents who know a sign language), phrases such as “transmitting [the language] to their children” need to be rewritten to put the emphasis on whether children are learning the language, not who they are learning it from. Some changes are considerably more challenging, however, such as the importance of writing. Although writing systems have been devised for some sign languages, no signing community makes regular, widespread use of a writing system. Yet, many signed languages are used in schools and thus have institutional support and other mechanisms of standardization that parallels what happens in spoken languages with established writing systems. We propose, therefore, that the key criteria that distinguish EGIDS levels 4 (Educational) and 5 (Developing) from level 6a (Vigorous) is not writing but the extent of standardization and institutional support, particularly from the formal educational system. Similarly, it is necessary to characterize normal use of a language (not in written form) in a way that does not use the word “oral”, which presupposes spoken languages. Instead, we propose “face-to-face communication”.
In making these modifications, some larger questions about language vitality of signed and spoken languages have needed to be considered. What sociolinguistic characteristics of signed languages result in a level of vitality that is comparable to a given level for spoken languages? Or, to put it another way, to what extent are signed and spoken languages affected by the same factors, and when there are differences, are these differences analogous between the two modalities? Are signed languages more or less robust than spoken languages when facing analogous pressures? (Anecdotal evidence suggests that sign languages are very resistant to replacement by spoken languages, but very easily replaced by other sign languages.) The revised EGIDS provides a first step toward answering such questions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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