Читать книгу Language Prescription - Группа авторов - Страница 11
Оглавление3Inferring Prescriptivism: Considerations Inspired by Hobongan and Minority Language Documentation
Marla Perkins
1 Introduction
Beginning with introductory linguistics courses and continuing throughout graduate education and into professional publication, prescriptivism is presented to linguists as an inadequate way of analyzing linguistic material, and descriptivism is presented as a vastly preferable alternative. This type of bifurcated thinking might be useful as a way to introduce people to the idealized goals of linguistic analysis, but in actual linguistic practice, pragmatically inferable prescriptivism can affect the ways in which linguistic analyses are created, interpreted and used. In this chapter, the prescriptive/descriptive concepts and their complications are examined in light of my ongoing linguistic description of Hobongan.
Studying prescriptivism was not part of the project when I began documenting Hobongan; the goal was to produce a linguistic description of the language, from a descriptive standpoint. But I have encountered many complexities while documenting this language, and they have necessitated a re-evaluation of the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide. These encounters provide the foundation of this chapter. My focus on Hobongan, then, does not stem from any particular aspect about that language with regard to prescriptivism, although in retrospect, the graded social status of the various dialects and the language planning policies of Indonesia, both topics addressed below, have undoubtedly been a catalyst for many of my thoughts. Presumably any language being documented for the first time and with enough social variation among its speakers would prompt similar questions. The decisions required for managing variation in language documentation as well as the consequences of those decisions are the key features that would be shared in several language documentation endeavors, and responding to those challenges opens up questions about prescriptive practice in general.
1.1 Introduction to the language and community: Hobongan
Hobongan is an Austronesian language, according to its categorization as provided by a survey of the languages of Borneo (Hammarström et al., 2017; Lewis et al., 2016; Sellato & Sercombe, 2007). Syntactically, it is primarily Subject Verb Object (SVO), and morphologically it is primarily analytic. For this chapter, the social context of the language is crucial. The language is spoken by approximately 2000 people across three generations and is the dominant language in the geographic area in which it is spoken. This dominance is evidenced by the fact that people wish to marry into the Hobongan group, partially because there is gold along the parts of the Kapuas River that lie within traditional Hobongan territory. There are five main Hobongan villages mostly along the Kapuas Hobongan Rivers, with some smaller groups living farther from the main rivers. In part because of their frequent travel along the river and their community involvement in major events, the Hobongan interact across village groups frequently, which minimizes dialectal variation across groups but does not minimize such variation across generations.
The Hobongan mostly maintain a traditional lifestyle, with a few exceptions. They now travel regularly to a town, Putussibau, where they can exchange gold for cash and buy supplies that they do not readily produce themselves. Education has changed enormously: the Indonesian government provides a schoolteacher for the elementary school children in the community, and all elementary education takes places in Bahasa Indonesian (BI), the official language of the Indonesian government, except for one course in Christian religion that was developed by a missionary who works with the Hobongan. If families want children to continue their education beyond the elementary grades, the children must move into town and find people with whom to live while they attend school, most of which takes place in BI or in a local lingua franca. In part because of the shift in education, living within the Hobongan community after graduation is optional, and some Hobongan have chosen to live permanently in town, rather than to return to the Hobongan villages and lifestyle.
1.2 Terms and methods
For the purposes of this chapter, prescriptivism and descriptivism are defined as they are customarily defined within the field of linguistics (Drake, 1977: 1, for example), with prescriptivism involving a ‘concern for “correctness”’ and a desire to ‘enforce uniformity and conformity to some absolute standard,’ and descriptivism involving ‘analyzing language as it currently functions in actual use.’ Drake emphasizes the notions of conformity and stability in prescriptivism, and of change and diversity in descriptivism.
The type of fieldwork conducted in this project is community-based language research (CBLR). Czaykowska-Higgins (2009) described CBLR as language research conducted on a language or languages, for the language community, with the language community and by the language community. In other words, the linguists involved are active participants as opposed to external observers (Dimmendaal, 2001), and native speakers are involved in the process of data collection and analysis, both as sources of data and as experts on the language or languages that they speak.
2 Prescriptivism after Description
Due to the complexities of languages and of the situations in which language research is conducted, there are many possible ways in which prescriptivism can interact with the research process. Despite language description often meeting the core criteria of descriptivism, in that it is based on and promotes documentation of change and promotion of diversity over conformity, the realities of how on-the-ground linguistic analysis is used challenge those core criteria. Many parties have an interest in language descriptions, and each introduces inferences and preferences into the interpretations and uses of descriptions. Some of these uses are perhaps inevitable, but I hope that this analysis of how descriptions are often understood and used prescriptively can influence and improve the ways in which descriptions are created and used so as to benefit the people involved.
2.1 In the field
It might be hoped that when a linguist is in the field, working among members of a language community, prescriptive ideas can be minimized to the point of elimination. However, a variety of factors contribute to making prescriptive ideas and ideals an integral part of the fieldwork situation.
2.1.1 In the field: Data collection – what is collected?
One way in which descriptive practice is inferentially introduced into prescriptivism derives from traditions about what information is typically included in language descriptions. My survey of descriptions of over 50 languages from over 30 language families showed (see Perkins, 2017, for a publication of some of the results) that a majority of those descriptions did not include material on discourse, units of the language that are larger than the sentence, as Pike (1964) called them. In other words, the descriptions included information about phonology (sound systems), morphology and syntax, but omitted analyses of narratives or other texts. In some cases, texts were included, but more typically, sentences were the largest units described, analyzed or included. Because many kinds of discourses are important in the languages of the world, including oral histories, recitations of familial relationships, religious or ceremonial material and other types of narratives, this oversight seems all the more serious. It is unlikely that the linguists who assembled these descriptions failed to notice the importance of these materials to the people with whom they worked. Indeed, my own experience among the Hobongan suggests that larger-than-sentence discourses are vastly more important to native speakers of a language than are the syntactic, morphological or phonological details.
There could be a variety of phenomena that contribute to this omission. An important aspect might be the traditional inertia in the field of linguistics.1 If linguists are trained in field methods, much of that training is based on the resources already available. If linguists need to train themselves in field methods or update their knowledge about a specific language family, they rely on the materials that are already available. When a linguist settles into a language community to conduct linguistic research and work towards a description, all of the linguistic information, including sociolinguistic information and the discourse types important to that community, is freshly available to the linguist. The task of sorting through it is immediately overwhelming, and field linguists must make decisions about how to proceed in collecting and organizing data. Consulting previous language documentation is a natural strategy: if a language does not have a description, it is likely that closely related languages have been described, and their patterns can provide a way into the analysis. But in the past, phonology, morphology or syntax have been the aspects of language most often included in language descriptions, with no explanation or theory-driven account provided for the customary omission of anything beyond syntax. Thus, phonology, morphology and syntax still constitute the core of most linguistic descriptions today.
This omission means that resources allowing linguists to compare and contrast structures cross-linguistically are predominantly available for the above-mentioned aspects (see Perkins, 2017, for a typological approach to analysis of narrative discourse). The common availability of certain kinds of information (phonology, morphology, syntax) and the corresponding unavailability of other kinds of information (semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, etc.) pragmatically suggest that the phonology, morphology and syntax are more important to descriptions than other kinds of linguistic information are. In my experience with Hobongan, which would likely apply to work with other minority languages, the analyses of sound systems, morphology and syntax are relatively simplified because of the wealth of material on a wide variety of languages, while the analyses of other aspects of language are made more difficult by having to forge a new path. This difficulty, and the additional time and effort required to do the analyses of larger-than-sentence materials, no doubt inhibit some linguists and other field workers from going beyond the background that is available to them.
This privileging of phonology, morphology and syntax may reflect a bias towards what Joseph calls the ‘natural’ rather than the ‘human-oriented’ (see Joseph, this volume). The study of phonology, morphology and syntax has typically emphasized their systematic status more than their connections to societal concerns. In that regard, those areas of linguistics may seem further removed from societal or human contingencies, and thus may seem more ‘natural’, whereas sociolinguistic, discourse and pragmatic concerns may seem more ‘human-derived’. Joseph claims that this same bifurcation provides the foundation that divides descriptivism (natural) from prescriptivism (artificial). Descriptivism aims to identify what is natural about language, without recourse to the human element, which is inherently impossible because languages are imagined, constructed and used by real people in real situations. Without the human element, there is no language to be described. It could be that this same bias for the ‘natural’ ends up privileging the areas of language least connected to the societal concerns of the people who speak the languages.
This traditional omission of any aspect of language beyond syntax is sometimes enshrined in what linguists have come to accept in a published (or publishable) description. Comrie and Smith (1977) published an extensive outline of questions to ask when collecting and analyzing information for language descriptions. This outline includes material on sound systems, syntax and morphology, but not one question, much less a section, on any other domain. The questionnaire has been used as an informational template for several language descriptions. Comrie and Smith provide this questionnaire with the best intentions of helping linguists ensure that their descriptions are as complete as possible and that the material contained within their descriptions is comparable across descriptions, but this approach has a number of difficulties. One of the main difficulties is that nothing beyond phonology, morphology or syntax is included. As noted, aspects of language beyond these three elements are more important to native speakers, making this inventory of material inadequate for what native speakers need. Another drawback is that not every language has the same patterns as other languages, making large portions of the questionnaire irrelevant for many languages while potentially omitting material that is relevant, even within sound systems, morphology and syntax, particularly in languages that have not yet been descriptively analyzed. Descriptions written according to this kind of questionnaire are therefore linguistically incomplete in ways that could be avoided if a less prescriptive approach to the contents of descriptions were more acceptable within the field. Fortunately, this approach to description has been changing over the past couple of decades. More and more linguists are including more kinds of linguistic information in their descriptions, making their descriptions truer to the rich variety of languages and what language speakers can do with their languages.
This traditional focus on only certain aspects of language and the neglect of others is not usually included in the notion of linguistic prescriptivism, yet the effects are similar. Analogous to the ways in which language prescriptivism favors certain variants over others, professional biases favor certain language domains over others in language descriptions. Additionally, in the way that favored variants in language prescriptivism can come to be seen as more legitimate than others, the most-described domains of language can also come to be seen as more legitimate, even more linguistic. The bias already present in previous descriptions has a way of perpetuating itself, not unlike the traditional character of language prescriptivism. While the linguists who write and consult these descriptions have no intention of telling speakers how they should use or think about language, linguists might still be susceptible to the ‘is becomes ought’ process that Joseph outlines in this volume. What has been done in descriptions previously often continues to be done.
This kind of unstated bias is particularly difficult to identify and be honest about. Once recognized, however, it becomes clear that the kinds of information collected often reflect the ideals of linguists that have arisen through the history of the discipline more than they reflect realities among members of a language community. In recordings and observations that I have made in which people were spontaneously engaged in language use, the clear majority of the content comprised personal narratives, discussions of current and future events, recitations of genealogies and other types of discourse. Overt discussion of structures in words or sentences was rare, occurring only for about 15 minutes as part of a single and unusual discussion of sociolinguistic phenomena. The Hobongan used specific examples of words, as well as personal narratives of their experiences, to comment on their sociolinguistic situation; they framed their discussion and discourse sociolinguistically rather than syntactically. If linguists were objective and descriptive observers of the language around them in a field situation, then discourses, and the pragmatics that make discourses work, would be the major component of description, followed by sociolinguistics, with only a few examples of sentences and sounds-in-words – a pattern that is nearly opposite to how content is managed in traditional language descriptions.
Furthermore, a question is raised about how traditional limitations on descriptions might have affected or might continue to affect language conservation efforts. When language descriptions provide material that looks drastically different from native speakers’ language usage, and those descriptions are then presented to speakers as descriptions of their languages, speakers could decide that, if that is what their languages really look like, there is no reason to conserve them. Their languages could become unrecognizable even to the speakers, and what remains recognizable would be only a tiny portion of what the languages are to and for the speakers.
2.1.2 In the field: Working with language informants
Working with informants introduces many complexities. The fact that linguistic description is often based primarily and exclusively on data provided by native informants can be similar to prescriptivist practice and have similar effects, in that the informants perform the role of the expert much like the prescriber in the prescriptive tradition. Often, a description of a language rests on the information provided by a single native speaker or, at best, a few speakers. The information, therefore, is literally an ipse dixitism, which is one of the hallmarks of prescriptivist practice. In a way, the description of the language rests on the intuitions of a single speaker or a small group of speakers, just as the description of a ‘correct’ language in the prescriptive tradition rests on the opinions of prescribers, who separate themselves from those who are pragmatically presented as the hoi polloi of language users. The motivations, of course, are different. The informants are not necessarily proscribing any forms by offering their own intuitions, whereas the prescribers are. Yet, depending on the number of informants and their representativeness of all speakers, the effects of their information can be similar to the effects of language prescriptivism. What counts as a native speaker is a question that has been raised and answered in a variety of ways (see Bonfiglio, 2010: 8–20, for a review of some of the major possibilities, along with Kalogjera & Starčević, 2014). In practice, native speakers, those who grew up speaking within a language community, have a variety of levels of expertise and of willingness to share whatever expertise they have with a researcher. The native speakers who contribute to language descriptions are therefore a group of people who are often partially self-selected by their willingness to help and partially available simply because of geographical and personal background. They are, therefore, usually not a representative sample, statistically or otherwise, of the community of language speakers.
2.2 Using descriptions
Prescriptivism continues to be evident once a description is completed. Many parties have an interest in language descriptions, and each introduces preferences into the uses of descriptions. Some of these uses are perhaps inevitable, and awareness of the ways in which people’s preferences guide the uses of descriptions could perhaps allow linguists to create descriptions that are as descriptive as possible while still being useful.
2.2.1 For language preservation: Maintaining diversity, minority rights
One outcome of linguistic description and analysis, particularly of minority languages, is the documentation and preservation of those minority languages and cultures. In some cases, a basic description of a language is all that is left of a language and culture whose native speakers have all died. Language documentation itself is therefore a form of prescriptivism, with the prescriptive idea being that any language and culture is worthy of preservation and therefore ought to be preserved in whatever form can be managed, whether that is through basic documentation alone or with more thorough work.
Currently, the Hobongan language is fairly stable, being spoken by the three generations of people who are recognized as generations: children, people who have children, and people who have grandchildren. However, because there are few speakers, only about 2000, and because of economic, bureaucratic and educational pressures, the Hobongan might not be able to maintain their language without significant linguistic, educational and institutional support.
The Hobongan themselves have recognized that their language is changing in ways that make it less Hobongan and less spoken by their children,2 and they have, to some extent, recognized the major causes of those shifts. They know that when they go to Putussibau to trade, the interactions are conducted in BI and a local trade language known as Malayu (not to be confused with Bahasa Melayu as used in Malaysia). They know that the Indonesian government requires all documentation of marriages, baptisms and citizenship to be in BI, and that official documentation has certain benefits such as the ability to travel or receive healthcare. They know that educating their children in BI is having drastic effects on the language and culture. They have noted with dismay that grandparents cannot discuss night-time dreams with their grandchildren because the grandchildren do not have the same expertise in the Hobongan language (having been educated in BI) or culture (having spent large portions of their childhoods living in Putussibau in order to go to school). Despite understanding many of the factors that are impinging on the Hobongan language and culture, the Hobongan have yet to take steps that would help them to maintain their language and culture.3 Such steps could include developing grade school curricula in Hobongan so that their children can stay in the Hobongan villages for their education and maintain their everyday uses of the language, or recording their oral histories as part of what is needed to gain minority rights from the Indonesian government. Many Hobongan do participate eagerly as language informants, moving the description along towards completion, which will in turn be available to them if they decide to move forward in the process of gaining minority rights.
As a linguist, I prefer to think that the Hobongan should, prescriptively, work towards preserving their language and culture by the means that are available to them, but this is a decision that cannot and probably should not be made by others. Language preservation works best when the language speakers themselves wish to preserve the language, a principle that is available from descriptive studies of language preservation efforts (e.g. Crystal, 2000). Although the Hobongan recognize the pressures on their language and culture and are not pleased by some of the changes, particularly when those changes negatively affect familial intimacy, they have not made the decisions that I would prefer that they make. Instead, they have made decisions that benefit them in ways that are more important to them than maintaining their uniqueness as Hobongan. These kinds of differences between what a linguist might want for a language community and what community members themselves might want come from differing perspectives. Linguists typically focus primarily on languages. Members of the community focus on all aspects of their lives including, in the case of the Hobongan, economic factors and social status, both of which can be enhanced by giving up the language, or at least by making significant concessions to the majority language and culture. Until languages and the people who speak those languages are valued for their unique contributions, by linguists, by language speakers and by those with power and influence in the majority language and culture, language preservation efforts will have to compete with all other complications of minority status.
2.3 For education and creativity
If the Hobongan were to develop grade-school curricula, the question arises as to what form of the language would be used and taught in school. Language descriptions typically privilege one dialect or form of a language over another, usually in an effort to provide the expected single description of a complex situation and to make the writing of a description doable in a finite amount of space and time. Despite the complexities involved in the creation of language descriptions, description materials are often used for creating standard forms and therefore a single, simpler form of a language, which then, through the educational process, become the forms that people ‘ought’ to use and that are taught in schools (Kalogjera & Starčević, 2014). In Hobongan, /r/ and /d/ are both produced in a variety of environments, leading to two main possibilities: they are allophonic variants of a single phoneme or they are different phonemes. Native-speaker consultants differ in their opinions as to whether they are different phonemes or different allophones. The missionaries who worked on creating a writing system for Hobongan treated the variants as allophonic variations, despite some native-speaker insights to the contrary. They were probably correct to make a decision: one language cannot be written in multiple ways without negative outcomes for understandability. The writing system itself is then reinforcing, in some ways prescribing, a certain understanding of the phonology of the language.
In addition, even though both main possibilities are included in the description-in-progress, and even though both main possibilities are in frequent use by native speakers, one understanding and use occurs in 10–15% of cases, and one understanding and use occurs in 85–90% of cases. Curricula necessarily oversimplify material to minimize possible confusion for students (minimizing confusion is a prescriptive ideal; presenting material in its full complexity has not, to my knowledge, ever been tried, particularly at elementary levels of instruction). That kind of minimization would likely privilege the majority version of the language over minority versions of the language, as has already happened in the orthography. In the case of Hobongan, such privilege might not appear to be a huge problem, but in other languages, such as Daqan and English, in which dialect variations are major parts of life, such privilege can disadvantage thousands or millions of people, as well as provide access to the advantages of the majority language and culture. The prescriptivism that can be developed from descriptions has real consequences for individuals and minorities-within-minorities.
On the other hand, as an anonymous reviewer has pointed out, noting variations in languages can be a way to generate interest among students of language and linguistics and could therefore be used to enhance the education of students and the preservation of variants. However, even if variants are presented, they tend to be presented in contrast to a standard. This pattern might not need to be the case, but as a student and professor of linguistics at various times, I have never encountered a presentation in which variants were truly treated as options among equivalents, and my own efforts in that direction have been inadequate. Often, a description provides the standard by which variants are defined as such. There is a standard, and there are variants, and descriptions often contribute to making that distinction. For example, if I had been working primarily with one of the outlying groups of Hobongan speakers, rather than with one of the larger groups in one of the larger villages, I might have privileged, intentionally or not, a set of variations that are used by a small minority of people. A description based on that privilege could pragmatically imply that the variant described is the standard. If the description were used as the basis for curricula, the minority variant would become the standard, and a majority of students would be educated to conform to a minority variant. It is not necessarily ethically preferable to educate minority students to conform to a majority variant, or vice versa. A language description that includes some variants, noting who uses the variants and when and how, would pragmatically privilege some variations over others, even if the information in the description were purely descriptive, because the social distinctions, and the sociolinguistic markers that indicate those distinctions, would emerge from the description.
The form of a language chosen and used for education, then, becomes the form of a language preferred when language is used for writing. As a reviewer pointed out, in language descriptions, privileging some aspects of language such as syntax, over others such as analyses of various common genres, might suggest to native speakers that the privileged aspects of the language are in fact more important than the others. This privileging approaches a prescriptive-style focus on form over larger-level structures in the language which contrasts with the descriptive importance of larger-than-sentence units of language. The Hobongan have already lost several genres of chants and incantations in converting to Christianity. Their language considered as langue is important enough to warrant documentation and translation efforts, but their uses of language might not be important enough to them to maintain. Nevertheless, the Hobongan might begin to record their remaining oral histories, stories and songs and to create new histories, stories and songs.
Furthermore, traditional materials might exist in parts of the community whose language variety has not been recorded or given priority in description, but when the materials are recorded in written form, that written form would probably be what is standardized for education, which is the context in which people acquire writing. The standard form will miss some of the information that might have been available if each variant were given equivalent importance. A language description can have prescriptive consequences for any given language well into the future.
2.4 For ease of governance and commerce
Language descriptions are also used by agents of governments to determine whether people should receive legal or institutional protections for their language and, if so, what those protections should be. Language documentation is a crucial component of gaining minority rights in Indonesia because people are assumed to be Indonesian and speak BI until the people can document that they are who they say they are. Ironically, minorities must accommodate majority language and ways of doing business in order to demonstrate that they are not the majority. As with using language descriptions for developing educational materials, one variety of a language is typically privileged over other varieties, in part because the complexities of language in actual use make governance of actual people extraordinarily difficult. A description can be used, in prescriptively best-case scenarios, to protect minorities and individuals, but it can also be used to impose the prescriptive ideals of the majority-within-the-minority on all members of a community, because descriptions necessarily privilege one form of a language over other forms. The finite and descriptive necessities of language documentation can therefore justify or become government policies, again making for real consequences for real people.
3 Summary and Conclusion
How is a linguist to live with herself? The practicing linguist has been trained to conduct language description and analysis without oughttas, haftas or s’postas. What often happens with language descriptions is that linguists do their descriptive jobs to the best of their abilities, but through the process of language description and publication, inferences about what is or is not valuable regarding a language can affect what is done with those descriptive materials.
3.1 A false bifurcation
In this consideration of the process of creating a language description, the descriptive–prescriptive bifurcation has been shown to be inaccurate, impossible or unhelpful in various ways (see also Cameron, 1995; Milroy, 1992; among others). More options are needed. At the very least, the bifurcation needs to be expanded.4 The concepts remain useful, particularly if field linguists are aware of the concepts and how to appropriately use them during the field process.
There are multiple origins for prescriptivism. Some prescriptivism arises out of the necessities of accessing native-speaker expertise, including disagreements about the language. Some prescriptivism arises out of differences in priorities, such as the difference between a linguist’s idea that each language is inherently valuable and some language speakers’ ideas that being able to participate in the perceived prosperity of the majority culture is more important than retaining a language. Some prescriptivism makes language description possible but then arises on the other side of the description, such as in privileging a majority over a minority language form when creating educational or new language materials. And some prescriptivism can be used, depending on the people behind its uses, to protect or discriminate against speakers of minority languages. When even contradictory outcomes are possible, it is difficult for descriptive linguists to know how to create the most relevant and least damaging materials.
3.2 Where to go from here?
With several types of both prescriptivism and descriptivism available, the continued use of the bifurcation remains questionable. It might be clearer to those conducting research and those contributing to research and those using research if different terms were available for the different concepts required by the realities of field research. Discussions of variation, deviance (Chomsky, 1995; Zahedi, 2007) and idiolect are crucial in the development and applications of more specific terms that are predicated on the sources of prescriptivism and whether that prescriptivism is used to benefit or to harm. The concepts might vary depending on what arises in any given field situation, as well. If so, a reconsideration of the terms and concepts based on what is found in field situations could become necessary. Descriptive research might again become the driving force behind not just descriptive theoretical development, but also developments in explanatory theory.
Acknowledgements
The specific language informants do not wish to be individually identified, but they must be acknowledged as a group for their consistently generous, thoughtful and profound contribution to the research on Hobongan. My work has also been immeasurably aided by Rachel Searcy, whose knowledge of Hobongan language and culture has made much of this research possible.
Notes
(1)There are notable exceptions, for example: Greene (1999) wrote a description of Belizean Creole which was based primarily on a sociolinguistic analysis of the language; Sonora Yaqui Language Structures (Dedrick & Casad, 1999) includes several narratives with some analysis of the structures of those narratives; Kieviet (2017) includes a more generous selection of interlinear texts than many other descriptions, although the author limits himself to analysis of sounds-through-syntax.
(2)I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer who brought to my attention the fact that older generations can be dismayed by language changes and start insisting that a language be spoken in an ‘authentic’ way and that such insistence, which is an attempt to preserve a language, can have devastating effects on younger people’s willingness to try to speak the language (e.g. Dorian, 1994, for East-Sutherland Gaelic).
(3)As of early 2019, a Hobongan student decided to continue on to university to study education, with the stated goal of returning to the Hobongan villages to teach students in Hobongan. I sincerely hope that she can continue towards her goal and will be able to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to develop a curriculum in her first language. There is broad community support for her project, but whether that translates into concrete support after she graduates remains to be seen.
(4)Some linguists have emphasized norms and normativity instead of standards and prescription in an attempt to distinguish more precisely the types of interventions made to establish the status of a language (see Armstrong & Mackenzie, 2013; Haas, 1982).
References
Armstrong, N. and Mackenzie, I.E. (2013) Standardization, Ideology, and Linguistics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.
Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Comrie, B. and Smith, N. (1977) Lingua descriptive studies: Questionnaire. See http://imp.lss.wisc.edu/~jrvalent/LIN427F2005web/attachments/LDSQWordOutline.doc.
Crystal, D. (2000) Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Czaykowska-Higgins, E. (2009) Research models, community engagement, and linguistic fieldwork: Reflections on working with Canadian indigenous communities. Language Documentation and Conservation 3 (1), 15–50.
Dedrick, J.M. and Casad, E.H. (1999) Sonora Yaqui Language Structures. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Dimmendaal, G.J. (2001) Places and people: Field sites and informants. In P. Newman and M. Ratliff (eds) Linguistic Fieldwork (pp. 55–75). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dorian, N.C. (1994) Purism vs. compromise in language revitalization and language revival. Language in Society 23 (4), 479–494.
Drake, G.F. (1977) The Role of Prescriptivism in American Linguistics, 1820–1970. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Greene, L.A. (1999) A Grammar of Belizean Creole: Compilations from Two Existing United States Dialects. Bern: Peter Lang.
Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M. and Bank, S. (eds) (2020) Glottolog 4.2.1. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. See http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/hovo1239
Haas, W. (1982) Introduction: On the normative character of language. In W. Haas (ed.) Standard Languages Spoken and Written. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kalogjera, D. and Starčević, A. (2014) Deconstruction of the native speaker and ideology of the standard language: Language users caught between descriptivism and manipulation. English Studies as Archive and as Prospecting 9, 18–21.
Kieviet, P. (2017) A Grammar of Rapa Nui. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Lewis, M.P., Simons, G.F. and Fennig, C.D. (eds) (2016) Hovogan. In Ethnologue: Languages of the World (19th edn). Dallas, TX: SIL International. See http://www.ethnologue.com.
Milroy, J. (1992) Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Perkins, M. (2017) Toward a typology of ranking elements of narrative discourse in languages and cultures: A cross-linguistic survey. International Journal of Literary Linguistics 6 (1). See https://journals.linguistik.de/ijll/article/view/101
Pike, K.L. (1964) Beyond the sentence. College Composition and Communication 15 (3), 129–135.
Sellato, B. and Sercombe, P.G. (2007) Introduction: Borneo, hunter-gatherers, and change. In P. Sercomb and B. Sellato (eds) Beyond the Green Myth: Borneo’s Hunter-gatherers in the 21st Century (pp. 1–49). Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.
Zahedi, K. (2007) Grammaticality in the minimalist program. Journal of Human Sciences 55, 85–94.
