Community Members Make a More Comprehensive Record

The literature on language documentation and description commonly underscores the
importance of fostering close relationships with speech communities and promotes the notion
that active community involvement “lead[s] to better overall documentation” (Arka 2018; c.f. de
Lima Silva and Riestenberg 2020; Vallejos 2014). To date, however, no detailed analysis has
been conducted of the differences between documentary materials collected by community
members and those collected by community outsiders. This talk considers two criteria
commonly applied to good overall language documentations, explores how they may be
measured, and assesses the documentary materials collected with varying levels of involvement
from four speaker communities of northern Tanzania over the last decade: the Asimjeeg
Datooga (Griscom 2018), Gorwaa (Harvey 2017), Hadza (Griscom and Harvey 2020), and
Ihanzu (Harvey 2019).
First, we consider the criterion of comprehensiveness, that is the “collection of representative
texts of all discourse types, all registers and genres, from speakers representing all ages,
generations, socioeconomic classes, and so on” (Austin and Grenoble 2007, c.f. Himmelmann
1998). Comprehensiveness of the documentary record can be measured through the analysis of
speech-act and participant metadata, and we find unequivocal evidence that community
member involvement contributes greatly to the diversity and quantity of documentary materials
when compared to documentation created by a community outsider.
Second, we consider the criterion of naturalness, or the degree to which “communicative events
[are] unaffected by any external interference into the conventional communicative routines of
the participants” (Himmelmann 1998, c.f. Foley 2003; de Léon 2009, and Klamer and Moro
2020). Due to the “observer’s paradox” (Labov 1972), it is impossible to know the exact
properties of unobserved language use, and each data collector will have a unique effect on the
observed linguistic behavior, depending on their relationships with the other participants and
their own mode of participation. For this reason, we propose that the criterion of naturalness be
abandoned in the assessment of documentary materials, and that it be replaced by a broader
view of comprehensiveness which stipulates that both those creating documentation and those
being documented should be as diverse as possible.
Across all of the four documentary projects surveyed in this study, we find empirical evidence
that the level of active involvement of community members in collecting recordings contributes
directly to the comprehensiveness of the documentary record, thereby also increasing its value
for both the speaker community and academic community.