Can the Subaltern Document? A mixed methods analysis of community-led language documentation

When involving members of a speech community in the documentation of their own language, it is common to work with speakers who have some experience with formal education or technology. But what about communities whose speakers have very little access to both? This talk describes documentary projects spanning approximately ten years and involving four different speaker communities of the Tanzanian Rift Valley Area, all of which could be described as low-resource, marginalised, or existing outside of the larger power-structure.

We aim here to assert that not only are Insider Researcher led projects in these contexts possible, but that they also result in objectively better documentations. This talk presents a mixed methods analysis showing how Insider Researcher led projects can produce documentations more comprehensive than those produced solely by outsider researchers, and thus of greater value to both linguists and fields beyond. We also show that, especially in the context of marginalised speaker communities, Insider Researcher led projects can produce documentations more emically meaningful than those produced solely by outsider researchers, and thus of greater value to the speaker community itself.

Methods will include a quantitative review of our projects, showing how Local Researchers work in different patterns to outsider linguists (i.e. the authors), as well as a qualitative examination of the nature of some of these different patterns.