LDTC On Tour
As the realization of the importance of communities invested in the documentation process of their own language grows, LDTC’s training model leads as an example. Our mission of empowering speakers is going beyond the walls of the University of Hawai‘i and heading on tour!
Training in Your Community
Contact us for more information about how we would be willing to collaborate or how you can implement your own training workshop!
Documenting Minority Languages in Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia
In May 2018, a collaboration between the Language Documentation Training Center at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Leiden University, and Universitats Kristen Artha Wacana, was sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, Universitas Kristen Artha Wacana, and the US National Science Foundation to develop a one week intensive training program in language documentation for people from Nusa Tenggara Timur who are taking an interest in their local and regional languages, and have the potential to play a major role in documenting these languages.
Workshop structure & Results
The project partnered over 30 NTT language enthusiasts who are not professional linguists with graduate linguistics students and senior linguists from Indonesia, Europe, and the US, and provided additional international research training for graduate students from Europe and the US. The primary goals of the workshop included capacity building, raising awareness of endangered languages, and establishing connections. We achieved these by providing training in basic linguistic analysis, language documentation software (ELAN, ffmpeg, Audacity), proper data management, and providing an opportunity for fieldwork experience. Analysis and software training occurred for two days before breaking into eight small groups for three-day long mini field trips, then two days were used to focused on data management and compiling documented materials. We were able to produce a booklet containing wordlists, folk stories, MPI elicitations, and plenty of photos, which can be viewed here. And all of the recordings can be discovered through the Paradisec Archives. The languages documented were Helong, Abui, Uab Meto at Burain, Amarasi Nekmese, Rote Termanu, Rote Lole, and Sar.
