Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim

The Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim or ELPR is a nationwide project started in October 1999 at Kyoto University, Japan, under the financial support from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science,, and Technology or MEXT. In this project almost all linguistic fieldworkers in the nation working on languages of the Pacific Rim have been mobilized. The total number of people involved is more than 200 including about 40 graduate students and about as many linguists and specialists from abroad who have helped us as consultants, collaborators, or conference participants. The grant provided is under Scientific Research on Priority Areas which is of the largest type in funding among the Ministry’s Grant-in-Aids for Scientific Research, somewhat similar to the National Science Foundation in the United States of America.
　　　The main aim of ELPR is fieldwork-based documentation of endangered languages of the Pacific Rim, with particular emphasis on severely endangered ones. The Pacific Rim here includes the Pacific and its surrounding areas. To us, linguistic documentation is not a mere recording of audio and visual data, which is a far cry from what we like to have. Particularly in case of moribund and isolated languages with speakers rapidly diminishing in number, of which there are quite a few in the Pacific Rim, we are obliged to emphasize documentation with good and minute analyses which could be achieved only with the help of speakers having deep linguistic insights. Research aimed at formalistic tinkering is precluded.
　　　As of today, almost three years and a half since the start of the project, we have about 130 items of documentation published already or scheduled to come out very soon, as given in the attached list of publications classified according to the areas ([A1] South Pacific Rim, [A2] North Pacific Rim, [A3] East and Southeast Asia, and [A4] Japan) and categories ([B] miscellaneous and [C] general). In terms of content the publications are mostly grammars, dictionaries, various genres of texts including children’s picture books, and pedagogical texts, some of them being accompanied by CD-ROMs. Although the quality of products may vary, please keep it in mind that they are the result of three short years. We are open to any comments and criticisms concerning the publications.
　　　Through the progress of this project for three years and a half, we have become aware of a number of issues and problems, getting nevertheless new insights and directions as well. For one thing, as is evident from the publication list, the A2-group, that is, the group on the North Pacific Rim languages has turned out to be by far the strongest of all. The North Pacific Rim includes Siberia, the Northeast Asia, Alaska, and the Pacific side of North America. Notably this North Pacific Rim group is not only most productive (note that half of the areal publications belong to this group) but also most organized in research activities, and it has a growing number of (i) promising young graduate students who can carry out linguistic work by themselves and (ii) fieldworkers who are determinedly active in helping out the speakers and the community in their struggling for language revitalization (by devising orthographies, preparing pedagogical materials, training bilingual teachers, organizing children’s language classes, and so on). The North Pacific Rim is a field for which may be of international contribution, say, as some kind of regional center possibly in cooperation with such experienced institution as Alaska Native Language Center.
　　　We have had four International Conferences so far, mainly at Kyoto, to discuss various issues of endangered languages and to raise public awareness of language endangerment. It was at the Second Conference held in the fall of 2001 that the idea of preparing a basic guideline on language vitality and endangerment for UNESCO was first suggested for us by Mrs. Noriko Aikawa, Head of Intangible Heritage Section. This has eventually led to the formation of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Unit’s Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages and to the 28-page document Language Vitality and Endangerment presented by the Group.
　　　Although the general awareness is still very low in Japan, some favourable albeit small changes are taking place. Just one thing for example, very recently the Graduate School of Letters at Kyoto University earmarked one full-time position devoted to endangered language issues, which means that the School decided to work cooperatively with our ELPR project. A few years earlier, this would not be imagined to happen.
　　　The project is simply an initial attempt of active Japanese fieldworkers to make what little contribution we can in documenting and safeguarding endangered languages in the world. We firmly believe in continuing and improving the contribution, although our capability is limited and the conditions surrounding us are still far from favourable. Now that the first phase of the project is coming to an end, we are now planning the next step by focusing on the more severely endangered languages but at the same time incorporating into our scope areas other than the Pacific Rim, for example, African languages, on which we already have a good number of linguists. No doubt, however, we have many and much to rely upon expertise and experiences from you who have gathered in this Meeting, sincerely asking for any suggestions, cooperations, or even “pressures” from outside in whatever ways you can to make our project even better.
　　　To conclude, more generally, international linking together of efforts should be a sine qua non for this immanent and global issue of retaining linguistic diversity, in other words, in order to retain the healthiness of “logosphere”, which term Michael Krauss proposed for the web linking the world’s languages in a way analogous to the web that links ecosystems into one biosphere (Maffi, Krauss, and Yamamoto 2001: 74 ).