Documenting Endangered Languages: Achievements and Perspectives

During the past few decades, the venerable practice of documenting languages has acquired such academic trappings as scholarly publications, university departments, funding initiatives, a repertoire of practices, theoretical diversification, and specialist terminology. Here contributors identified only by name look at theoretical issues in language documentation, documenting language structure, documenting the lexicon, and interaction with speech communities. The topics include competing motivations for documenting endangered languages, aspect in Forest Enets and other Siberian indigenous languages, documentary linguistics and prosodic evidence for the syntax of spoken language, making a multimedia encyclopedic lexicon for and in endangered speech communities, and filming with native speaker commentary. Annotation �穢2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)