Overall documentation urgency (DU) is measured as the average of six special documentation urgencies in phonology, morphology, lexicon, text corpus, syntax, and semantics/pragmatics. These in turn are measured as overall degree of endangerment times special degree of documentation need, where endangerment is the inverse of estimated language vitality and special documentation need is the inverse of the estimated sufficiency of existing special documentation.
The language vitality score is calculated from eight different factors such as age of youngest speaker, number of speakers, percentage of monolingual speakers etc. (for details cf. the comments to the demoquestionnaire.)
This is not to deny that the task of saving the peoples who are sometimes endangered together with their language is much more important; it's just that this task is not specific to linguists! Those who wish to participate in helping endangered peoples may contact organizations like - Survival International, 310 Edgware Road, London W2 1DY, UK; phone ++44-71-2421441, fax ++44-71-2421771,
or - Gesellschaft fuer bedrohte Voelker, Postfach 2024, D-37010 Goettingen; phone ++49-551-499060, fax ++49-551-58028,
e-mail: gfbv-germany@oln.comlink.apc.org
- in January 1991 a special symposium entitled "Endangered Languages and their Preservation" was held at the Annual Meeting of the LSA,
- in 1991 a volume on "Endangered Languages", edited by R.H. Robins and E.M. Uhlenbeck, appeared (Berg, Oxford/New York),
- in March 1992 "Language" published a collection of essays in its vol. 68, and
- in August 1992 the XVth International Congress of Linguists devoted a plenary session to this topic, both with the same title as the Robins/Uhlenbeck volume,
- in October 1992 the working group 'endangered languages' of the DGfS (German Linguistic Society) published an "Informationsbroschuere zur Dokumentation von 'Bedrohten Sprachen'",
- in August/September 1993 the University of Cologne hosted a summer school on language description and fieldwork,
- at its September 1993 meeting, the Linguistic Association of Great Britain (LAGB) had a special session on Endangered Languages,
- in July 1994, a workshop on Language shift and maintenance in the Asia-Pacific region was held at La Trobe University, Melbourne,
- on the 7 Sep 1994 Endangered-Languages-L electronic forum at ANU was established (http://coombs.anu.edu.au/CoombsHome.html),
- at the January, 1995, LSA Meeting there was an organized session called 'Field reports/Endangered Languages',
- in February 1995, there was a conference on Endangered Languages at Dartmouth college, and for
- on April 21, 1995, the University of Bristol held a seminar
on the conservation of endangered languages.
- November 18-20, 1995, there was an International Symposion on Endangered Languages at the newly founded ICHEL (International Clearing House for Endangered Languages, U of Tokyo, http://www.tooyoo.L.u-tokyo.ac.jp/).
Another thing is to MOTIVATE linguists to do the necessary field work once the money is available. This has to include a change in hiring politics and CV-evaluation: Time spent for field work should count as favorable for a candidate, and not the opposite.
And a third thing is to provide the motivated and funded linguist with the necessary INFORMATION on where to go first, since he is in the situation of a fire fighter when fire is all over the place. And this is where the LINGUIST discussion list (with over 7200 subscribers, more than 1.4 per existing language) and similar ones come into play.
ldul@cis.uni-muenchen.de
If you want to know more about LDUL, simply a message to this address with the following entry under "Subject" (the message body may be empty, or, if your mail system doesn't tolerate this, contain anything, it will be ignored):
about LDUL
and you will receive the information you are reading right now. If you just want a short overview of supported mail commands, send a message (again with empty or trash body) with the following entry under "Subject":
mail commands
If you think you have discovered a bug in the program, send a
corresponding message (no empty body!) with the following entry under "Subject":
bug
send demoquestionnaire
The system will mail you a copy of a completed questionnaire with annotations that specify the different questions.
When you've done this you will hopefully want to complete an empty questionnaire, and you can get one by sending another message under "Subject":
send questionnaire
The system will send you by return mail a copy of a blank
questionnaire.
Once you have completed a questionnaire (please read the annotations to the different questions that come with the demoquestionnaire carefully!), write
deposit questionnaire
into the subject field and mail the completed questionnaire to the same address.
The way it is treated there is the following: If the language code on the questionnaire you have completed is identical with the language code in a questionnaire already on file, your contribution is added to that file, else a new file is opened. So it's the language code that counts for the identification of a language and not its name(s), since there are too many ambiguous language names! If you deposit a questionnaire without the language code, LDUL will add it for you, if your language name is unambiguous, else it will complain.
For each vitality factor you have either checked one of the five values (there is a minimum, a maximum, and three intermediate degrees), or the option 'unknown'.
The weights of the first vitality factor (age of youngest speaker) are 0, 4, 8, 12, and 16 points, the weights of the other seven factors are 0, 3, 6, 9, and 12 points each. The total vitality score therefore ranges from 0 (worst case, lowest vitality) to 100 (best case, highest vitality).
If you are not in a position to give information on all the factors, the vitality score will be an interval rather than a point value.
Suppose all other factors add up to 20, but the language attitude is unknown. Then the vitality score will be the interval between 20 (worst case, very negative attitude) and 32 (best case, very positive attitude). If another questionnaire on the same language contains information about language attitude, your 'unknown' contribution is simply ignored.
The sufficiency (quantity and quality) of existing documentation in a given domain such as phonology is given a score of 1, if it is very high (completely sufficient), and 0, if it is completely unsufficient, with the three obvious intermediate values.
The special Documentation Urgency or DU scores are calculated as (100 - vitality score) * (1 - special documentation sufficiency score).
For instance the text corpus DU score will be 100 (the maximum) just in case vitality is 0 and the text corpus documentation sufficiency score is 0 as well. The overall DU score as the average of the special DU scores will therefore be 100 (the maximum) just in case vitality is 0 and all special documentation sufficiency scores are 0 as well.
If you check only 'unknown' in either the vitality or the documentation section, you will receive a corresponding error message:
The error occurred while parsing :
No vitality information specified in Section 2 !
or
The error occurred while parsing :
No documentation information specified in Section 3 !
Subject: Re:info on lisu ( TLC=lis )
The (TLC=lis) information is important here, since there is another language named Lisu with a different three letter code (TLC=tkl), and if information is on file on that language as well, it will also be in your mail. So if you are in doubt about the identity of the language you are inquiring about, please consult the "Ethnologue Database" to find out among other things the three letter code of your language, e.g. via the World Wide Web:
http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/ethnologue.html
or
http://www-ala.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rap/Ethnologue/
or via Gopher:
gopher://sil.org/11/gopher_root/ethnologue/
2. If you want to know which languages have been treated so far, send the subject entry
get languages
to LDUL, and it will mail you the current alphabetical list of names of languages about which information is on file.
3. If you want to know the current overall documentation urgency (DU) ranking of the languages that have been treated so far, send the subject entry
get overall DU ranking
and LDUL will send you a list of the languages on file, ranked
according to their overall DU scores.
4. If you want to know one of the current special documentation urgency (DU) rankings of the languages that have been treated so far, send one of the subject entries
get phonology DU ranking
get morphology DU ranking
get lexicon DU ranking
get text corpus DU ranking
get syntax DU ranking
get semantics/pragmatics DU ranking
to LDUL, and it will send you a list of the languages on file with their appropriate special scores, ranked according to these scores.
5. If you want to know the complete current statistics, send the message
get statistics
to LDUL, and it will mail you its complete statistics in its current state:
- the number of completed questionnaires,
- the number of languages treated,
- the average number of completed questionnaires per language,
- the list of languages ranked according to their overall DU score,
giving for each language
- the language code,
- all language names collected so far,
- the number of completed questionnaires for this language,
- the overall documentation urgency score for this language together with
- the special urgency rankings of its aspects (phonology etc.),
with the average value first followed a maximum and a minimum value,
(the latter two matter only for interval values and can be neglected
if they coincide)
- the language's vitality score,
- its endangerment score,
- its overall documentation score, and
- its overall documentation need.
Since this file will soon be rather bulky, be careful with this command.
One factor that had to be neglected in the design of the questionnaire is the degree of relatedness of the language in question to the 'next' well- documented language: the lower this degree, the higher the documentation urgency.
Another thing is that the program cannot resolve contradicting information on the same language. It will rather compute the average scores, e.g. if one contributor thinks the quantity and quality of the documentation on Tsachila phonology is medium (.5) and another one thinks it is low (.25), it will come up with a score of .375.
The whole enterprise is a first and as such an experiment, but I think it is worth trying. Let me conclude with a somewhat pathetical appeal:
Linguists of all countries, unite and try to save what can be saved of what you love enough to devote your professional life to: contribute to LDUL! Dr. Dietmar Zaefferer Institut fuer Deutsche Philologie phone: +49 89 2180 2060 (office) or Universitaet Muenchen +49 89 2180 3819 (office) Schellingstr. 3 +49 89 36 66 75 (home) D-80799 Muenchen fax: +49 89 2180 3871 (office) Germany email: ue303bh@sunmail.lrz-muenchen.de
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