“Is this my language?”
Developing a writing system for an endangered-language community
It used to be taken for granted that language documenters would develop an
orthography for the language which they document in cases where no writing
system exists already. Such systems facilitate the production of materials
for revitalization of the languages. Lately however questions have been raised
as to whether the time and money expended in such endeavors are worth it.
Two main reasons are that the orthographies are not often used anyway and,
where they are successful, since they are often standard orthographies, they
destroy variation in languages. In this paper, I argue that standardization goes
with literacy development, and is desirable in situations where it is clear that
such languages would be used in school situations. However, most languages
of endangered communities do not have any prospect of being used in school.
Because of this rather than focus on the development of a standard orthography
system, documenters should rather develop systems that enable communities
to write in the vernacular. Such systems use “orthographic transcription” which
minimally ensures the association of sounds with letters. Beyond that, speakers
are allowed to write as they speak. This means that colloquial expressions
and dialectal differences would be incorporated into the system of writing. The
advantage of this system is that adults particularly do not have to spend a long
time learning to represent their languages in ways that may not necessarily be
the same as the way they speak. I discuss the experience I had with Nyagbo
where my development of a vernacular writing system proved more successful
with the community than an attempt to develop a standard orthography.
References
Ameka, F.K
2012 Ewe: Its grammatical constructions and illocutionary devices. München: LINCOM EUROPA.
Ameka, Felix
2013 Literacy as a double-edged tool. Paper presented at the Summer School for Language Documentation. Buea, Cameroon.
Bamgbose, Ayo
2000 Language and Exclusion. Munster: LIT.
Blommaert, Jan
2008 Grassroots Literacy. London: Routledge.
Cahill, Michael
2014 Non-linguistic factors in orthographies. In
Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages,
Keren Rice &
Michael Cahill (eds), 9–26. Dallas TX: SIL International.
Dakubu, Mary Esther Kropp & Ford, Keven C
1988 The Central Togo languages. In
The Languages of Ghana,
Mary Esther Kropp-Dakubu (ed.), 119–153. London: Kegan Paul International.
Dorvlo, Kofi
2005 Language use in education in minority language areas. In
Identity Meets Nationality: Voices from the Humanities. Selected Proceedings of the 7th Faculty of Arts Colloquium, 100–111,
Helen Lauer,
Nana Aba Amfo &
Jemima Asabea Anderson (eds). Accra: Subsaharan Press 3.
Duthie, Alan S
1996 Introducing Ewe Linguistic Patterns. Accra: Ghana Universities Press.
Dwyer, Arienne M
2006 Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis. In
Gippert,
Himmelmann &
Mosel (eds), 31–66.
Elbow, Peter
2012 Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing. Oxford: OUP.
Essegbey, James
1999 Inherent complement verbs: Towards an understanding of argument structure in Ewe. Ph.D dissertation. Leiden University.
(MPI Dissertation Series in Psycholinguistics 10).
Essegbey, James
2009 Noun classes in Tutrugbu (Nyagbo).
Journal of West African Languages 36: 37–56.
Essegbey, James
2013 Vowel harmony in Tutrugbu. Paper presented at the Workshop on 10 Years of GTM Research in the Netherlands, May 31, Leiden University.
Fitzgerald, Colleen, Hyslop, Gwen, Rice, Keren & Stenzel, Kristine
2010 Orthography development: The ‘midwife’ approach. CoLang 2012 Infield.
Funke, Emil
1910 Die Nyangbo-Táfi Sprache: Ein Betrag zur Kenntnis der Sprachen Togos.
Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen 13(3):166–201.
Heath, Shirley Brice
1982 What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school.
Language in Society 11(1): 49–76.
Heine, Bernd
1968 Die Verbreitung und Gliederung der Togorestsprachen. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
Koffi, Ettien
1994 The representation of tones in orthography.
Notes on literacy 20(3): 51–53.
Kutch Lojenga, Constance
2014 Orthography and tone: A tone-system typology with implications for orthography development. In
Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages,
Keren Rice &
Michael Cahill (eds), 49–72. Dallas TX: SIL International.
Levine, Bruce
2013 The Fall of the House of Disney: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South. New York NY: Random House.
Lüpke, Friederike
2011 Orthography development. In
Handbook of Endangered Languages,
Peter Austin &
Julia Sallabank (eds), 312–336. Cambridge: CUP.
Lüpke, Friederike & Bao-Diop, Sokhna
2014 Beneath the surface – Contemporary Ajami writing in West Africa exemplified through Wolofal. In
African Literacies. Ideologies,
Scripts, Education,
Kasper Juffermans,
Yonas Mesfun Asfaha &
Ashraf Abdelhay (eds), 86–114. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Mayer, M
1969 Frog, where are you? New York: Dial Books.
Mühlhaüsler, Peter
(1990) ‘Reducing’ Pacific languages to writing.
Ideologies of Language, ed. by
John Joseph and
Taylor Talbot, 189–205. London/New York: Routledge.
Nugent, Paul
1997 Myths of Origin and Origins of Myth: Politics and the Uses of History in Ghana’s Volta Region. Berlin: Das Arabisch Buch.
Nugent, Paul
2005 Early settlements and archaeology of the Adja-Tado cultural zone. In
The Ewe of Togo and Benin (A handbook of Eweland Volta),
Benjamin Lawrence (ed.), 1–13. Accra: Woeli Press.
Schultze-Berndt, Eva
2006 Linguistic annotation. In
Gippert, Himmelmann &
Mosel (eds), 213–252.
Seifart, Frank
2006 Orthography development. In
Gippert, Himmelmann &
Mosel (eds), 275–300.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Essegbey, James
2021.
Documenting Oral Genres. In
The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore,
► pp. 131 ff.
H. Ekkehard Wolff
2019.
The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics,
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.