REFLECTIONS

ON LANGUAGE
DOCUMENTATION
20 YEARS AFTER
HIMMELMANN 1998
edited by
Bradley McDonnell
Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker
Gary Holton

Language Documentation & Conservation

Special Publication 15
 Reflections on Language Documentation
20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

edited by

Bradley McDonnell
Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker
Gary Holton

Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 15

Published as a Special Publication of Language Documentation & Conservation

Language Documentation & Conservation

Department of Linguistics
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Moore Hall 569
1890 East-West Road
Honolulu, Hawaiʻi 96822
USA

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University of Hawai‘i Press

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Honolulu, Hawai‘i
96822-1888
USA

© All texts and images are copyright to the respective authors, 2018
c All chapters are licensed under Creative Commons Licences

Cover design by Jack DeBartolo 3

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-9973295-3-7

http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24800
 Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Bradley McDonnell, Gary Holton & Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker

RE-IMAGINING DOCUMENTARY LINGUISTICS

2 Reflections on the scope of language documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Jeff Good
3 Reflections on reproducible research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Lauren Gawne & Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker
4 Meeting the transcription challenge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Nikolaus P. Himmelmann
5 Why cultural meanings matter in endangered language research . . . . . . 41
Lise M. Dobrin & Mark A. Sicoli
6 Reflections on (de)colonialism in language documentation. . . . . . . . . . . 55
Wesley Y. Leonard
7 Reflections on public awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Mary S. Linn

KEY ISSUES IN LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION

8 Interdisciplinary research in language documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Susan D. Penfield
9 Reflections on language community training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Colleen M. Fitzgerald
10 Reflections on funding to support documentary linguistics . . . . . . . . . . 100
Gary Holton & Mandana Seyfeddinipur
11 Reflections on ethics: Re-humanizing linguistics, building relation-
ships across difference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins
12 Reflections on diversity linguistics: Language inventories and atlases. . . 122
Sebastian Drude
13 Reflections on the diversity of participation in language documentation 132
I Wayan Arka

iii
14 Reflections on software and technology for language documentation . . . 140
Alexandre Arkhipov & Nick Thieberger

BEYOND DESCRIPTION: CREATING & UTILIZING DOCUMENTATIONS

15 Reflections on descriptive and documentary adequacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Sonja Riesberg
16 Reflections on documentary corpora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Sally Rice
17 Reflections on the role of language documentations in linguistic
research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Stefan Schnell
18 Reflections on documenting the lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Keren Rice
19 Reflections on linguistic analysis in documentary linguistics . . . . . . . . . 191
Bradley McDonnell

VIEWS ON LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION FROM AROUND THE WORLD

20 Reflections on linguistic fieldwork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202

Clarie Bowern
21 The state of documentation of Kalahari Basin languages . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Tom Güldemann
22 From comparative descriptive linguistic fieldwork to documentary
linguistic fieldwork in Ghana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Felix K. Ameka
23 Caucasus — the mountain of languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
Manana Tandashvili
24 Reflections on language documentation in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Shobhana Chelliah
25 Reflections on linguistic fieldwork and language documentation in
eastern Indonesia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
Yusuf Sawaki & I Wayan Arka
26 Reflections on linguistic fieldwork in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Ruth Singer
27 In search of island treasures: Language documentation in the Pacific . . . 276
Alexandre François
28 Reflections on language documentation in the Southern Cone . . . . . . . . 295
Fernando Zúñiga & Marisa Malvestitti
29 Reflections on language documentation in the Chaco. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Lucía Golluscio & Alejandra Vidal
30 Reflections on fieldwork: A view from Amazonia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
Christine Beier & Patience Epps

iv
31 Reflections on linguistic fieldwork in Mexico and Central America . . . . 330
Gabriela Pérez Báez
32 Reflections on language documentation in North America . . . . . . . . . . . 340
Daisy Rosenblum & Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker

v
29 Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 15
Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998
ed. by Bradley McDonnell, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker & Gary Holton, pp. 303–320
http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/
http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24831

Reflections on language
documentation in the Chaco
Lucía Golluscio
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Universidad de Buenos Aires

Alejandra Vidal
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Universidad Nacional de Formosa

This chapter focuses on field research aimed at documenting Chaco languages

with varying degrees of vitality, specifically those spoken in Argentina and
in the vicinity of the Argentinian/Paraguayan, Argentinian/Bolivian, and
Paraguayan/Bolivian borders. The case studies here selected provide an
overview of recent experiences conducted in Chaco within the framework
of Himmelmann 1998’s foundational program on documentary linguistics
and subsequent publications along these lines. We emphasize the results of
collaborative research on equal grounds and a discourse-oriented approach
to language documentation. Our reflections also highlight the current
threatening situation of indigenous peoples and their languages and discuss
the function of language documentation, preservation, and archiving in this
fragile scenario, with a view to supporting community language use and
transmission as well as ongoing and future research in South America.

1. Introduction1 In the early 1990s, a relevant publication in Language by Hale et al.

(1992), placed the topic of endangered languages around the world on the international
academic agenda. Explicitly linked to this topic, the seminal paper by Himmelmann
(1998) brings the issue of linguistic documentation to the forefront while advocating for
documentary linguistics with an autonomous status similar to descriptive linguistics.
1 Weare very grateful to the editors of LD&C for their invitation to collaborate in this volume and their
recommendations to our first manuscript as well as to two anonymous reviewers for their comments and
suggestions. Our special thanks go to the following colleagues for their generous contribution to the article:
Elizabeth Birks, Florencia Ciccone, Luca Ciucci, Santiago Durante, Hebe González, Analía Gutiérrez, and
Verónica Nercesian.

ISBN: 978-0-9973295-3-7
Reflections on language documentation in the Chaco 304

In this article, we focus our reflection on contemporary collaborative research projects

on Chacoan languages developed within the documentary linguistics framework. After
this introduction (§1), in §2 we briefly consider a set of case studies; then, based on the
results of those initiatives, we reflect on language documentation in the region and in
South America (§3). Finally, in §4 we present the proposal for the creation of the South
American Network of Regional Linguistic and Sociocultural Archives, with a view to the
present and future work on language documentation and preservation, including the issue
of data accessibility and exchange.
Chaco, in the heart of South America, comprises a vast lowland territory ranging from
southeast Bolivia and the southwestern area of the Mato Grosso in Brazil northwards,
to the westernmost area of Paraguay and northeast of Argentina southwards. It is a
plurilingual region where twenty languages belonging to seven linguistic families are
spoken with differing degrees of vitality. Moreover, extended multilingualism phenomena
have been registered on the Bolivia/Argentina/Paraguay border (Campbell & Grondona
2010; Ciccone 2015).2
The panorama among Chaco peoples is particularly complex. Many of them inhabit
lands currently belonging to different countries and, therefore, ruled by different socio-
educational policies. In Argentina, Intercultural Bilingual Education was until recently a
program under the National Education Law enacted in 2006. However, resistance from
many sectors, including some of the teachers themselves (Vidal & Kuchenbrandt 2015:
91), and the limited availability of materials for bilingual education mean these peoples
are not offered equal opportunities within the educational system and literacy in their
languages is not always valued by national or regional governments.
The situation regarding linguistic vitality is also heterogeneous. On the one hand,
there are communities where use and transmission of the heritage language is supported
by collaborative experiences in documentation and ongoing linguistic description, with
community-led linguistic activism (2.2, 2.3, 2.4). On the other, important language
attrition and shift processes have been documented (2.1). In particular, our field research
has shown that transmission to younger generations does not always occur (2.1, 2.4).
Language transmission and use is further affected by migration to the cities, where native
language teaching is seldom on the curriculum. Living in rural settings helps strengthen
shared socio-cultural ties. However, after moving to the cities, speakers usually become
a minority within a Spanish-speaking majority. See the following striking comparative
data (INDEC-ECPI, 2004-2005). Whereas less than half of Pilagá (48%) and Wichí (35%)
speakers live in urban areas in Argentina, the Toba/Qom proportion of urban population is
much higher (69%). This Census reports 99% and 91% of Pilagá and Wichí native speakers,
respectively, while the Toba/Qom speaker proportion is 65%. In spite of these figures, a
tendency towards incomplete language acquisition has been observed among Pilagá (2.4);
see also Tapiete (2.1). Hence, speakers of these languages in peri-urban settlements do
not achieve skills in some registers of their heritage language (principally, oratory and
narrative).
In Argentina, these processes have been triggered within a broader context defined
by a hegemonic Hispanizing language ideology fostered by the national state since the
second half of the 19th century. Other factors include speakers’ marginal status; changes
in organization, from hunter-gatherer to (semi)urban sedentary lifestyle; migration and
2 Fora complete view of of the distribution and situation of peoples and languages in the area, see Unruh &
Kalisch (2003), Censabella (2009), Lewis (2009). Detailed references on Chaco languages studies can be found
in Fabre (1998; 2017a [2005]), Golluscio & Vidal (2009-2010), and Campbell & Grondona (2012).

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

Golluscio & Vidal 305

integration with other indigenous or non-indigenous communities; everyday contact with

the Spanish-speaking population and media, and a diminished sense of ethnic pride caused
by racism and discrimination. In some cases, governments’ denial of these peoples’
Constitutional rights contributes to the situation. Even for those currently settled in rural
enclaves in Argentina, pressure by the spreading agricultural frontier into the forested
territories they inhabit is a crucial problem that puts not only their culture and language
transmission, but also their very survival at risk, not to mention serious local and global
damage caused by deforestation and soy plantations.3
Fortunately, the communities here considered have shown a great deal of interest in
language revitalization. The still everyday use of their languages ensures secure format
documentation to produce linguistic materials for educational purposes. These are the
reasons that have led to undertaking linguistic documentation of most Chaco languages
over the last twenty years (see §2).

2. Documentation of Chaco Languages focusing on Argentina and Paraguay

Fieldwork-based linguistic research by professional linguists focusing on Chaco languages
began in the 1960s and 1970s, and included grammars, vocabularies, and phonological
studies. From a descriptive perspective, they provided an analysis and written
documentation of these languages. Subsequently, work on Chaco languages increased,
especially through doctoral dissertations. Though relevant to our past and current
knowledge of the Chaco, these studies were not necessarily intended for language
documentation, neither did they adopt a discourse-oriented approach.
It was not until the early 21st century that practices and research projects within
the framework of documentary linguistics on Chaco languages began. The first was
the Chaco languages Project (2002-2005), “ Endangered Languages, Endangered Peoples
in Argentina. Documentation of four Chaco languages in their ethnographic context:
Mocoví, Tapiete, Vilela, and Wichí”, carried out as part of the Dokumentation Bedrohter
Sprachen (DoBeS) Program, under the auspices of the Volkswagen Foundation (see
Golluscio & Hirsch 2006).4 Audio and video resources from this project, mostly having
open access, have been deposited both in the DoBeS Archive and the Archive of the
Laboratorio de Documentación e Investigación en Lingüística y Antropología (DILA)
(http://www.caicyt-conicet.gov.ar/dila), created at the Consejo Nacional de
Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina, by agreement with the Max
Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in 2007.
In the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in available audio
and video records of Pilagá, Wichí, Chorote, Nivaĉle, Mocoví, and Ayoreo language
incorporated to the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) within the framework of
the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) and the Hans Rausing
Endangered Languages Project (HRELP). Likewise, Toba/Qom, Maká, and Mocoví
materials can be found in the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
(AILLA), which, in 2009, donated a copy of these resources to DILA-CONICET.

3 For more information on the socio-political and sociolinguistic situation in Argentina and Chile, see Zúñiga &
Malvestitti, this volume.
4 This collaborative documentation project settled at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) was conducted by

an interdisciplinary team under Lucía Golluscio’s supervision in academic collaboration with Bernard Comrie
(Department of Linguistics, MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology) (http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/projects/
chaco).

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

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Figure 1: Tapiete people. Awara Montes, Florencia Ciccone and members of the
community. Tartagal, Salta, Argentina.

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

Reflections on language documentation in the Chaco 308

Figure 2: Helena Cabeza (Tapiete comunity) holding a specimen of ñambɨ ‘spicy herb’
(Acmella oppositifolia). Photo by Hebe González.

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

Golluscio & Vidal 309

Vilela documentation has, instead, been based on a single-speaker-centered approach,

including both the documentation of linguistic attrition in our main consultant’s
speech and the systematization of language-remembering processes triggered during
his participation in documenting his language. The remembering strategies achieving
best results (see Figures 3 and 4) were his return home and joint work with his sister.
Narratives about topics relating to their own childhood, when the mother tongue becomes
engrained, were key to motivating remembering of the language. This situation brings up
an interesting question on the existence of latent cognitive strata that may resurface when
stimulated by emotionally-charged experiences. Finally, collaborative linguistic research
highlights the essential contribution of these last speakers’ generation to the knowledge
of: their heritage language, evidences of contact with other languages in and beyond the
area (Golluscio 2015), and the persistence of Vilela structural characteristics and lexicon
since the 18th century (Zamponi & Golluscio 2018).

Figure 3: Vilela language documentation. Returning to his place of origin. Mario López
with Analía Gutiérrez, team member. Photo by Marcelo Domínguez.

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

Reflections on language documentation in the Chaco 310

Figure 4: Recovering Vilela basic vocabulary. Art session at Mario López’ house with
his grandchildren, great-nephews and María Hellemeyer, team member. Photos by L.
Golluscio.

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

Golluscio & Vidal 311

2.2 Ayoreo discourse-oriented documentation The second project involves collabo-

rative documentation of Ayoreo discourse conducted in Campo Loro, Paraguay. Ayoreo
(Zamucoan) is still the language of communication in Paraguayan and Bolivian Ayoreo
communities, although some signs of linguistic attrition have been documented (Durante
p.c.). The 2012 census data for the above-mentioned countries estimate 1,862 Ayoreo
people in Bolivia (CEDIB 2012) and 2,481 in Paraguay (DGEEC 2012), with some commu-
nities as yet uncontacted in Paraguay. The speech community exhibits speakers of all
ages with the elderly and youngsters being mostly monolingual. The current vitality of
the language is clear in the narratives collected in close collaboration with the community
by Santiago Durante, a former PhD student at the University of Buenos Aires, under the
auspices of ELDP (https://elar.soas.ac.uk/Collection/MPI192274). However,
the presence of Spanish at school, in the media and in the social networks is jeopardizing
the future of the language.
This collaborative research has centered on the documentation of texts of various
genres in high-quality audio and video recordings. The collected stories, about life
before contact, evangelization and sedentarization, are of great interest, since Campo
Loro inhabitants have only recently come into contact with non-indigenous groups. The
outcomes of the analyzed and annotated text-corpus include a significant volume of
new information on Ayoreo grammatical structures based on naturalistic data and the
publication of a collaborative anthology of narratives (Etacore & Durante 2016) already
in use in the community. The book was welcomed by community members who interpret
it not as a finished product but as a first step in the process of documenting their cultural
and linguistic heritage (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Documenting Ayoreo. Benito Etacore and Santiago Durante editing the book
Campo Loro gosode oe ojñane udojo, Boquerón Department, Paraguay.

4 Our knowledge of the Zamucoan languages (Ayoreo and Chamacoco) owes much to Pier Marco Bertinetto and

Lucca Ciucci (Figure 6). See complete references on these authors in Fabre (2017b).

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

Reflections on language documentation in the Chaco 312

Figure 6: Documenting Chamacoco. Luca Ciucci with Francisco García and Domingo
Calonga, Paraguay.

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

Golluscio & Vidal 313

2.3 Nivaĉle: a single language and territory, two countries There are an estimated
1,000 Nivaĉle speakers in the provinces of Salta and Formosa, Argentina, and 12,000
in Paraguay. Today, there are open access audio resources for the community and
more broadly for linguists (https://elar.soas.ac.uk). With support from ELDP and
CONICET, Analía Gutiérrez has been investigating dialectal differences in Paraguay and
contributing to capacity-building for language transcription and decision-making with
regard to competing alphabets (Gutiérrez 2015) (see Figure 7). In Paraguay, this language
is the primary means of communication among family members within indigenous
communities, but Spanish and to some extent Guaraní are used with outsiders (Fabre
2017b). There are incipient bilingual programs in Paraguayan Nivaĉle community
schools. In Salta, the community is multilingual, living in peri-urban settings. Nivaĉle
communities in Formosa have received no attention from the local government and there
are no bilingual education programs to serve around 93 school and pre-school-aged
children from 180 families. Communities are denied most civil rights and recognition
as an indigenous group. There is extended Nivaĉle-Spanish bilingualism in Formosa but
no extended multilingualism as documented in the Bolivia/Argentina/Paraguay border
(see §1). In recent years, a project awarded by NSF to Alejandra Vidal as co-principal
researcher (see 2.4) has enabled the production of audio and video resources in Nivaĉle
spoken in Formosa, Argentina. Transcription, analysis and translation of 5 hours of texts
(conversations, narratives, songs) for archiving is currently underway. A selection of
Nivaĉle narratives was published for community use (Vidal 2015).

Figure 7: Work session at the First Meeting of Nivaĉle Teachers, Uj’e Lhavos, Paraguay,
Photo by Analía Gutiérrez.

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Reflections on language documentation in the Chaco 314

2.4 Collaborative documentation, description and revitalization activities of

Wichí and Pilagá Wichí language, spoken across the borders of Argentina and Bolivia,
is transmitted intergenerationally. Characterized by their visibility, with their own radio
programs and political organizations, representatives at government levels, some primary
and secondary school teachers, the Wichí are one of the most numerous groups in the
region (around 40,000 people).
Human resources training was a central issue in the DoBeS Chaco project (see
page 295) and continues to be so. Linguistic training of younger Wichí speakers from
settlements located by the Bermejo River, collecting oral discourse, developing reading
materials, vocabularies and grammar courses for the study of their language, culture
and history were activities pursued by Verónica Nercesian (Nercesian 2014a) (see Figure
8). Currently, the study of Wichí/Weenhayek dialectal varieties and sociohistorical
processes in Northern Argentina and Southern Bolivia is underway. A published Wichí
grammar (Nercesian 2014b) shows significant progress in new lines of research, such as
the interaction between phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. This model has
opened up a new perspective on the study of similar phenomena in other Chaco languages.

Figure 8: Recording session for the Oral History Archive, Ramón Lista, Formosa,
Argentina. Photo by Verónica Nercesian.

Pilagá, with its 5,000 speakers, does not enjoy the vitality it did 20 years ago
when Vidal’s research on the language began (Vidal 2001). Although intergenerational
transmission of the mother tongue still occurs in some rural communities, and language
teaching materials such as a talking dictionary and a learners’ grammar have been
developed for community schools (funded by ELDP and FEL; see Vidal & Miranda 2010;

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Golluscio & Vidal 315

Vidal, Almeida & Miranda 2014a–d), there are symptoms of linguistic attrition especially
in semi-urban and urban settlements.
A recent documentation project (NSF-DEL 263817) was established between the
University of Oregon (with Doris Payne as PI) and the Universidad Nacional de Formosa,
Argentina, with the purpose of obtaining high-quality audio and video recordings in
Pilagá and Nivaĉle spoken in Formosa, and text-collection for archiving (see also 2.3).
These include narratives on past conflicts and contact between Pilagá, Nivaĉle and Wichí
groups (see Figure 9). The texts support very fragmentary data provided by earlier
European travelers and ethnographers about encounters with indigenous peoples in the
Chaco region and their distribution in the territory where fieldwork is conducted.

Figure 9: Alejandra Vidal recording Pilagá stories, Km 30, Formosa, Argentina.

3. Directions in Chaco language documentation: Thoughts from the field The

initiatives on language documentation presented in §2 raise a number of issues. Following
Himmelmanns’s design for a language documentation project, our considerations evolve
in three directions: corpus collection, corpus theorization and the role of the participants.
Regarding corpus collection, the fragile situation and degree of endangerment of Chaco
languages described above provide a strong warning that, although linguistic analyses
may be conducted at a later date, documentation of indigenous languages in Chaco
and South America is extremely urgent with much work still pending. On the other
hand, documentation of these languages should allow for developing versatile fieldwork
methodologies to deal with a range of speakers in different situations and scenarios.
As to corpus theorization, we believe that the sharp distinction between documentation
and description proposed in Himmelmann (1998) had a foundational epistemological
function and relevance: It was necessary to constitute documentary linguistics as a field
of study having the same status as descriptive linguistics. Now, twenty years later, our
experience and that of other researchers in South America confirm the intimate feedback
relationship between documentation and description. In line with Evans (2008) and

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Reflections on language documentation in the Chaco 316

Woodbury (2011), the collaborative preparation of a dictionary and or a grammar can

at the same time raise the possibility of eliciting new texts, as shown by the Tapiete (2.1)
or Wichí (2.4) experiences. Conversely, the collaborative collection and edition of Ayoreo
(2.2) and Nivaĉle (2.3) texts constitute a primary source of information to ongoing studies
on the phonology and the grammar of those languages. Likewise, community activities
carried out during and after the language documentation projects here considered confirm
Himmelmann’s claim about the creation of available multipurpose corpora which can be
used for and beyond linguistic research.
Concerning participants, any scientific praxis involving fieldwork with communities
cannot and should not avoid reflecting on the impact of the intrusion of field researchers
in the lives of community members. This issue becomes relevant in the case of
South American indigenous peoples, socioeconomically very vulnerable and historically
threatened by non-indigenous society. Faced with this ethical question, the perspective
of collaborative fieldwork and the model of empowerment (Cameron et al. 1997) appear
as viable alternatives when proposing work agendas agreed on between the researcher
and the community, based on common interests.
Furthermore, research on Vilela, the severely endangered Chaco language mentioned
above (2.1), highlights the unique role of the last generation of speakers of a language in
the documentation, description, and history of their language and people. In addition to
the claim by Harrison & Anderson (2008) about the importance of including the speech
of semi-speakers and passive speakers in the documentation of endangered languages,
we affirm the relevance of applying language-remembering strategies in these situations.
As said elsewhere, “the attested processes of linguistic remembering and recovery defy
biological metaphors about the vital cycle of languages and their fate” (Golluscio and
González 2008: 238).
Finally, the urgent need to document lesser-known still living South American
languages, some of them critically endangered, and fill in some remaining gaps in
genealogical, typological and areal contact knowledge of the languages makes the
establishment of strong collaborative links a central goal. This issue is addressed in the
next and final section.

4. Looking ahead: Towards a South American Network of Regional Linguistic

and Sociocultural Archives Different academic institutions in South America
involved in linguistic and cultural documentation with indigenous peoples in the region
have set up a South American Network of Regional Linguistic and Sociocultural Archives,
with the foundational aim of strengthening interaction and exchanging information
and documentary resources between archivists, researchers and members of indigenous
communities. Some objectives of the agreement include: contributing to the knowledge,
preservation, valuation, transmission, and diffusion in national societies of South
American languages and non-standard varieties of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as
migration languages in contact with them; promoting the development of collaborative
language documentation as well as typological and areal research projects; maintaining
technological compatibility of files, and, ideally, developing shared criteria for the
classification of the contents; implementing a unified code of ethics for researchers,
donors, file users, community members and responsible archivists; ensuring long-term
preservation of databases and increasing security for stored data; working on creating
automatic copies distributed among the archives involved, respecting authorship rights,

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Golluscio & Vidal 317

ethical principles, regulating access restrictions; and establishing validation processes that
can be used for modeling other databases.
This network has its origins in the more than decade-long cooperation between
members of South American institutions. The exchange has long been active at informal
and personal levels, in particular thanks to researchers participating in DoBeS and ELDP
projects, as well as the use of similar technology in individual centers (Seifart et al.
2008). The project currently encompasses CONICET, Universidad Nacional de Formosa
and Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Argentina; Instituto de Investigaciones para la
Amazonía Peruana; Universidad de Chile; Centro de Estudios Antropológicos of the
Universidad Católica de Asunción (CEADUC), Paraguay; Pontificia Universidad Católica
del Perú, and Universidad del Azuay, Ecuador. The Museu do Índio and the Universidade
Federal do Rio de Janeiro through Bruna Franchetto’s active participation, as well as
the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Brazil have shared the Network’s objectives from
inception (Drude et al. 2009; Golluscio et al. 2013). As of this year, this initiative has
been assigned full legal status by an Agreement for Scientific and Technical Collaboration
signed by all Network members. The proposal is open to other South American archives
or institutions that wish to join this initiative on the understanding that the Network’s
ethical guidelines are respected.

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Reflections on language documentation in the Chaco 318

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Lucía Golluscio
[email protected]
Alejandra Vidal
[email protected]

Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998