The COVID-19 pandemic affected the capacity to conduct linguistic fieldwork in person. For many fieldworkers, this meant they needed to adapt, and do so urgently. This paper discusses a language documentation workflow based entirely on the online conferencing software Zoom, in which a linguist, external to the community, establishes a new project…

Indigenous communities working to reclaim their languages have called for a shift from the traditional research paradigm of language documentation and description, in which outsider scholars set the agenda, to one in which community language workers take on leadership roles at every stage of the process, possibly with secondary support from…

The world's linguistic diversity is severely underrepresented in research on cognitive and neural aspects of language processing, with great consequences for our understanding of the relationship between language, cognition, and the human brain. The practical challenges of carrying out neurophysiological (but also behavioral) experiments under…

On a 2022 fieldtrip to Ecuador, we encountered a large community of Media Lengua speakers in the province of Cotopaxi where the language was thought to be dormant. This is the same region where Pieter Muysken had first documented this 'mixed language' in the 1970s. However, subsequent fieldwork thereabout by several linguists had failed to turn up…

The field of language documentation continues to grow, but an historic split between sign language documentation and spoken language documentation persists. In order to fully understand the linguistic context within a community, it can be necessary to overcome this split by designing language documentation projects to address threatened and…

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

The purpose of this research is to support the language revitalization and reclamation of Nuu-wee-ya', a Dene language from Southern Oregon and Northern California, and to contribute to the discussions on methodological particularities of archive-based research for language revitalization. Nuu-wee-ya' is a sleeping language comprising three…

Although some critics consider it time-consuming and demanding, proponents of the monolingual approach for field research (i.e., learning to speak a target field language as part of the research process) argue that it can provide a unique insight into its structures. However, this claim remains largely unsubstantiated in the available literature…

We collaborated to investigate humor in the existing corpus of Kere (ISO639-3: sst). This collaboration was a useful test of the Kere corpus and led to the rediscovery of unarchived video recordings, which contained important contextual information. These videos had been deprioritized in the original deposit, but they contained important…

This article provides a descriptive guide to the documentation of Chedungun, the regional variant of Mapudungun (ISO 639-2 code arn) that is spoken by the Pewenche people. The 15-hour documentation is currently deposited in the Endangered Language Archive (ELAR) and corresponds to Phase One of a long-term initiative that is currently progressing…

We present a new corpus design for multi-lingual corpora that involve intra-speaker variation in different situational-functional contexts, including primarily spoken but also the written mode, with the aim towards enhancing language documentation efforts and resources. We illustrate how this comparative design and the resulting cross-culturally…

This paper discusses levels of access in language archives and their implications for assessment. In the absence of well-established criteria, part of the evaluation of language archives is often based on accessibility; roughly, the more "unrestricted" or "open access" content, the better the archive. In this paper, I argue…

Working with video data is on its way to becoming standard practice in language documentation. However, documenters looking on the web for guidance on standards and best practices for archiving audio-visual data encounter a vast and potentially confusing diversity of information. Unfortunately, a lot of information on archiving video is concerned…

Podcasts are a unique media that have been used in Indigenous and endangered language communities in the form of Indigenous radio podcasts, instructional websites, or tools to aid classroom instruction. A podcast called Rituals of Kanauji speakers was created in Kanauji, a low-resource Indian language variety. Using this case study in Kanauji, I…

Mobile apps have the potential to support collaborative fieldwork even where web connectivity is unreliable or unavailable. To explore this potential, we developed portable network infrastructure and custom-made field tool apps. We deployed this solution in remote communities in the far north of Australia, in connection with co-located cooperative…