Showing posts with label language documentation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language documentation. Show all posts

Sunday, November 11, 2012

The Silent Field (Yenguyelei Qha)

As part of the festivities for the annual post-harvest festival Ahunah (or Ahuna) in Zunheboto, the Sumi Cultural Association will be premiering the documentary The Silent Field (Yenguyelei Qha) today at 4.30pm at the Zunheboto Town Hall.


Shot over two years in villages across the district of Zunheboto, this film presents a selection of recorded material that covers over 25 groups performing different cultural activities associated with the traditional Sumi agricultural cycle. The film is part of a larger project aimed at documenting traditional rituals and songs that are no longer being transmitted to the next generation. Its title reflects the current anxiety associated with the loss of culture and identity among the Sumis.

A collaboration between old and young, foreign and local, this project hopes to create awareness and interest in traditional Sumi customs, and to help preserve the Sumi language and its various verbal art forms.


The makers of the film acknowledge and are grateful for the support of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Sumi Cultural Association.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

NEILS 6 - Last Day

I've been asked to write this year's conference report for the Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area (LTBA) journal, so I probably do want to make some more notes while the impressions are still fresh in my mind. I don't think the Vice-Chancellor's opening speech I mentioned in my last post will make it into the report.

The past three days have been really inspiring. Sure, the quality of the papers hasn't always been the most desirable, but I got to meet a number of native speakers working on their own languages, as well as people who are doing really exciting things in minority language education (MLE). People who are interested in linguistic theory to various degrees, but who certainly haven't forgotten that people are the ones who use language.

6th NEILS Conference

It's heartening to see so many local students in attendance, even if most of them are doing courses in EFL training and the only reason many of them come up to talk to you is to ask to take a photo with you. (They just want photos with the foreign visitors.) I even had a few people take photos 'with me' without even asking.

6th NEILS Conference participants

Of course, there are advantages to being one of the 'foreign scholars' (and therefore more 'senior'). This morning I was sitting at a talk and suddenly choked on my saliva, resulting in a extended bout of coughing. Within minutes, one of the volunteers had come up to me with a bottle of water!

I really shouldn't get used to such service.

With any luck, I'll be at NEILS 7 next year with a whole lot of exciting work to present.

Monday, January 31, 2011

NEILS 6 - Day One

Today was the first day of the 6th annual North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS) conference taking place this year at Tezpur University just out of the town of Tezpur, Assam. It's a great place for people for linguists and language workers and teachers working in the region to come and meet.


Now, the last time I came for NEILS it was held in Shillong, Meghalaya. It was a bit of a last minute trip and I'd only decided to attend at the last moment (I actually ended up spending half that conference at Cherrapunjee near the Bangladeshi border, hiking down to see the Khasi root bridges made by 'training' ficus trees to grow their roots across rivers. It was a trip I had planned to do anyway, but it just so happened that someone else from the conference was going there at the time.)

So today was my first time presenting at NEILS - I gave a talk on verb nominalisation in Sumi and how monosyllabic, disyllabic and sesquisyllabic verbs behave differently with regards to such nominalisation. I got some pretty good feedback. It's also always nice to present on the first day of a conference. It means you can relax for the rest of the conference and actually focus on what everyone else is talking about. In my case, it also meant having only one sleepless night.

It was quite an invigorating day for me, given that I got through the paper with no major hiccups. Outside the talks, I also had a few meetings with other participants regarding developing minority language educational materials. The sort of work being done is something I found truly inspiring. It just made want to head back to Nagaland and get a team together to do this sort of work now.

Of course there were a few really painful, though quite amusing moments. The first was when the vice-chancellor of the university, who knew nothing about linguistics, gave his ridiculously long welcome speech at the opening ceremony in the morning. All the while trying to sound like he knew what he was on about. He kept referring to 'the linguistics' and I couldn't tell if he meant 'linguistics' as a discipline or if he just got the wrong word for 'linguists'. For some reason he assumed that the majority of participants came from Nagaland, which was odd because there's only one Naga participant here (unless you also count me, as an adopted Naga). Then he went on for a bit about Nagamese and how to his ears it's like Assamese but 'without the Naga influence' (or something like that). There were a few terrible anecdotes he shared, before he mentioned the fact that he had spent 4 years in Germany and learnt that there are German words like tschüss which aren't found in the dictionary because they're 'slang words used by the young people'! (see Wiktionary entry here)

It's moments like these when I'm glad I'm just a nobody at these conferences and not sitting on the stage having to contain myself in front of the whole crowd.

The second incident happened when a presenter was asked how old the language she was working on was.

Given that languages are constantly changing, the question of a language's age seems quite absurd. I was told later that the Indian government takes the 'age' of a language very seriously, as it is one of the criteria used to judge where a language should be considered a 'Modern Indian Language'. Scott DeLancey clarified that what they really mean is 'How long has the language been written / had a written script?' The belief is that a language is only 'born' when it is codified in some written form.

That means that many languages here are still in their infancy, while most are still unborn!

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Indian Folklore Congress 2010

On Thursday (9 Dec) I was invited by a friend to attend with her the inaugural programme (basically the inauguration ceremony) of the 34th Indian Folklore Congress at ATI (Administrative Training Institute) Kohima. I thought it would be a good idea, given that the chief guest (guest of honour), Khekiye Sema, is Sumi himself, and back in Zunheboto we had originally planned to come down to Kohima to meet with him and discuss the oral literature project.


After the sweet little traditional song presentation by some Angami kids (see above), Professor Jawaharlal Handoo, the President of Indian Folklore Congress, gave the keynote speech. I wasn't terribly impressed with the speech because he simply read off a 5-6 page document that only some members of the audience were given. Still, I suppose it's the fashion for some professors to do that here (and having spent a year at a French university has given me more patience for such things). In the talk he mentioned issues to do with folklore and the construction of ethnic identity (I prefer the term 'negotiation'), which was all quite expected.


When the time came for the chief guest, retired government official Khekiye Sema, to speak, he was much more candid and natural. He started off by congratulating everyone who'd come from outside the state, suggesting that everyone should be given a medal of courage for 'daring' to come to this part of the world (to the few Indians who've heard of Nagaland, the place conjures up images of bloodthirsty headhunters, a violent insurgency, or just frightening food). He spoke about the loss of traditional oral literature and its transmission mechanisms, particularly with the loss of the traditional morung system after the arrival of Christianity. Also in more recent times, Nagaland University has not been giving much attention to the study of such traditional folklore.

Sure, there was the usual lament that with modernity and Christianity, the younger generation no longer knew the old traditions, but bear in mind that all this happened within the span of a generation or two (almost like Singapore's rapid urbanisation). At the moment, there is a cultural cringe among the younger generation who are quickly embracing Korean culture, after having done the same with American culture. (I'm sure it's a familiar story in other parts of the globe.)

He also spoke of the connection between Nagas and nature, and recounted his own experience with an old man from Aghünato village who was a were-tiger - I'd heard about such stories from friends in Zunheboto. Unlike the werewolves in the European tradition, people who are were-tigers don't physically transform into tigers, but their souls simply become tiger spirits (according to some people, these people actually have tiger spirits). In any case, there seems to be some bond between the human spirit and that of the animal, allowing that person to find out things happening in the jungle even if their body is physically at home. I like to think it's a kind of 'astral projection' of the soul.

After the talks were over, I decided to go up and speak with Mr Khekiye himself. I mentioned the World Oral Literature Project to him, and he suggested I speak with another Sumi man in Dimapur who'd done quite a bit of cultural documentation with the help of Mr Khekiye.

My heart sank a little bit when he gave the name of the person. I'd just received a copy of this person's 'Sumi grammar' and it wasn't particularly great. It wasn't even a grammar, more a vocabulary list, with a number of short traditional stories, presumably from the documentation project. But most of these were very badly translated from Sumi into English. Still, I'm off to Dimapur in a few days and hopefully I'll get a chance to meet this person and see what documentation he has already done.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Language vs Culture

At the Ahuna festival two weeks ago I met Ab. (click here for her blog). She'd just come back to Zunheboto after spending some time abroad, including a few years in the UK. Importantly, she'd heard about the World Oral Literature Project (WOLP) and had even contacted Mark Turin regarding the documentation of Sumi stories. One of the reasons I'd come back to Zunheboto (apart from the festival) had been to find native speakers who were willing and able to do documentary work on their own language, with the aims of producing a dictionary (and possibly a grammar). Incidentally, I had considered applying to the WOLP for funding as well - mostly so I could return to conduct a few workshops, but I never imagined I'd meet anyone who would be interested in recording texts right now.

So it was incredibly fortunate that I met her here in Zunheboto. We brought up the topic of doing a documentation project with H S R., the chairman of the Sumi Language Academy and the Sumi Cultural Association, who happens to be one of the most respected members of the community. And somehow, in the past week and a half, we've come up with a proposal to document a number of traditional songs and stories. These songs are rarely performed nowadays and only a few members of the older generation are familiar with them and even fewer are able to compose new ones.

We decided to do the project under the auspices of the Sumi Cultural Association, since the project will be looking at activities deemed 'cultural'. Without going into too much detail, we've spent three out of the past five days visting schools and offices (I've lost count of the number) seeking the support of important members of the community both financially and in spirit. I've also had more milk tea and amixi (snacks like biscuits that go with tea) than I would've liked. We're also planning a trip to Kohima later this week to meet with other officials to seek their support (and hopefully I'll be able to see some things at the Hornbill Festival too).

Now there are some members of the community whom I had spoken to about a dictionary project in the hopes that I could find someone to train to use the software and do a basic linguistic analysis of the entries - I personally would prefer a native speaker who can use a computer to do the dictionary than myself since a) I'm not a native speaker of the language b) there are capable young people who are proficient in both English and Sumi and c) there's a lot of administrative trouble for me to physically remain in the state and the country. In any case, no one suitable had been found, so I suggested that once I had secured some funding, we could put an ad up in the paper later next year and that I could return to do the workshops.

That all seemed fine until these same people heard about the documentation project. Suddenly, they're telling me not to forget the dictionary. One person went as far as to say that I should be doing the dictionary, not the 'cultural documentation' project. This is all in spite of my reassurance that such a documentation project will feed into a dictionary - stories and songs are composed of words afterall! So now I find myself in an odd conflict between 'language' and 'culture', which to me is completely ridiculous because they're both so inextricably intertwined.

I'm also not sure what they expect of me with regards to the dictionary. Over the past two weeks, I've had one-two hour sessions with a member of the Sumi Literature Board who's insisted on sitting me down and going through lists of animal names, unsure of their English translations, and simply describing them without any pictures! I've tried to hint that this really isn't the proper methodology for doing a comprehensive study of zoological terms, but apparently there's a list of plant and fruit names coming tomorrow...

At the moment I suppose I have to reassure these people that I'm not abandoning the dictionary (and I'm not), while at the same time looking for ways to implement a long term project even when I'm not physically present, which was the initial goal anyway. Ideally, I'd like to be back next year for 3-4 months, but it'll depend on funding and whether I get permission to remain in the state for that long a period of time.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Getting permission

Last night over dessert Lauren and I got into talking about the recent discussion on the RNLD (Research Network for Linguistic Diversity) mailing list concerning getting informed participant consent in linguistic research to study their language as well as permission to store recordings on a computer and allow the (controlled) release of such data. Much of the discussion appears to focus on non-literate communities.

In our experience and from what we've been told / read, speakers of minority languages don't usually see much value in having their language studied. There's usually little problem getting 'permission' to study a minority language - speakers are either happy that someone's interested in their language or confused as to why anyone would bother with it. Lauren and I both don't like the idea of 'imposing' ourselves on a language community (or speaker) and it would certainly be easier if the community simply asked for the help of a linguist on their language.

Incidentally, Pastor N., whom I am meeting with tomorrow, has done just that, asking for help with his language. Of course, the reason Pastor N. has asked for help with his language, is that years ago, some visiting SIL linguists came and started work on it, before quickly moving on to a related language. He therefore already sees the value in his language (even if the rest of his language community doesn't), thanks to those linguists all those years ago.

I suppose then that asking for consent in many speech communities is a bit like asking someone to share something that they don't really value (or even want). The kind of 'informed' consent that people in the discussion are talking about, implies that speakers already know the value of the languages they speak. But that usually happens only after a period of time when a linguist has been working on that language and people slowly realise that there is something of value there.

So then, and not to sound like a bureaucrat, but maybe we need at least two 'stages' of permission-getting? If we really want to protect what are perceived to be speakers' rights to their own languages, maybe we need to ask for permission first, then review what is permissible at a later more mature stage in the research. It would be like signing a treaty, then reviewing the terms of that treaty at a later stage.

I doubt such a proposal would sit well with researchers who want to know that the data they collect and openly share right now might one day be slapped with restricted access. But in my opinion, it's too easy to get a person to say 'yes' right at the start - it's like buying an antique chair from someone who views it simply as a dusty old object in urgent need of replacement.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Smashing the ceremonial champagne bottle

It's back to the world of blogging for me, as I spend two weeks of limbo in Singapore waiting my visas to Nepal and India to be processed. With the MA in Linguistics behind me, I suppose it's time for another adventure.

This next trip starts with three weeks in Kathmandu, followed by two weeks of trekking in the Khumbu region around Everest. I'll be flying to India in early November, where I plan to be in the North east from early November to late January 2011.  I've never been to Nepal, and I only spent a few weeks in NE India in early 2009. (My last memory of Nagaland was getting poisoned by my breakfast omelette at the Hotel Japfü before having to catch a -thankfully quick- train from Dimapur to Diphu that same day.)

I'm interested in work that's happening in Nepal on endangered languages and looking at what can be done in NE India, which in theory is the main motivation for the blog. Of course, there'll be the odd hellish travel story (with details slightly embellished) and tales of language learning difficulties.

Looking forward to learning some Nepali over the next weeks!