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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT. This paper presents two projects that combine research with community needs. The first project is an effort to develop a community-based team to work with archival recordings of Tohono O'odham. These recordings are located throughout the United States, yet are inaccessible, unpublished, and even untranscribed and untranslated. The second project represents recent work to develop a service-learning course at Texas Tech University, where tutors earn credit by tutoring English as a second language. This is done in collaboration with Literacy Lubbock, a community agency that already provides literacy and ESL instruction, with particular attention to working with Spanish speakers.
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1. INTRODUCTION. For a number of reasons, the field of linguistics may be uniquely positioned to make contributions to a culture of service in academia. The knowledge of linguistics has been deployed as a tool to fight language discrimination that affects marginalized groups. An early significant example of this would be the roles played in court cases leading to equal educational opportunities for children whose home language was a minority language or dialect. Linguists testified to the validity of African American English in the 1979 court decision, Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District (Wolfram et al 1999). The involvement of linguists also played a role in the United Nation's General Assembly passing a resolution in favor of acknowledging the rights of linguistic minorities to use their language variety, putting linguistic rights into the context of human rights (see the United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities at http://www.ohchr.org/ english/law/minorities.htm).
Documentary and field linguistics also offer the potential to contribute back to communities. Certainly such work preserves language and culture for future generations, and documentation can be used as a component to language revitalization programs.
Moreover, many linguists are used to being around people from diverse linguistic backgrounds. It is possible that this may translate into giving voice to those traditionally underrepresented in educational institutions, as well as potentially transforming educational institutions in student and faculty ranks.
Language and linguistic knowledge can be used as a vehicle for empowerment. The question this raises is whether there is a moral or ethical obligation to use our linguistic knowledge to counter prevailing myths about language, particularly when those myths perpetuate language discrimination. These questions are also important for the profession in our consideration of ethics, perhaps made more relevant by the establishment of an ad-hoc committee on ethics by the Linguistic Society of America in 2006.
But there is a longer tradition of linguistics in the sphere of public service. Consider the following: 'Linguistic science is uniquely equipped to redress the language dimensions of morally indefensible racist ideologies wherever they are found (Baugh 1999:9).' Baugh uses this in reference to a 1972 resolution by the Linguistic Society of America that addressed the linguistic reasons against the claim by Arthur Jensen in 1969 that genetic reasons existed showing that black children were intellectually inferior to white children (Linguistic Society of America, as cited in Baugh 1999).
In fact, there are a variety of cases where linguists have acted collectively. The Linguistic Society of America has passed additional resolutions on various issues (Linguistic Society of America), such as against English only laws (1987), presenting linguistic arguments for the validity of Ebonics/African American English (1997), against the Unz/Tuchman California Ballot Initiative (1998), and presenting linguistic arguments for the validity and independence of American Sign language (2001). Linguists have also offered congressional testimony, such as Michael Krauss' testimony on endangered Native American languages, and William Labov's testimony on using Ebonics to teach literacy to African American students. We see macro-level action and attempts to influence policy or have a presence in the media as public intellectuals, but there is a larger question of whether this has been sufficient to enact change in attitudes at individual levels in society.
We might frame this in the context of what are the responsibilities of individual linguists. A variety of people have set forth some of these responsibilities (Krauss 1992, Wolfram 1993, Newman and Ratliff 2001, Rice 2005) which include the responsibility to the field of linguistics, to the community of speakers, to minority communities, and to posterity in order to document endangered languages and cultures, to train speakers of minority languages and dialects as linguists, to attend to the significance of our linguistic examples for minority communities (i.e. how would non-linguists construct a set of ideas about some community if they saw data consisting of sentences using kill), and to future generations in terms of archiving and preserving. I would add here that individual linguists bear additional responsibilities to our local communities and to the university community (both as a local entity, as well as in the larger scope of academia). I would go further and state that linguists, in some way, should be working toward a just and equitable society using language and linguistic education as a vehicle for this goal.
To that end, I will discuss two strategies for community-based linguistics, both coming from my own experiences as a linguist. The first consists of collaborative efforts to document Tohono O'odham with an eye to language maintenance and revitalization. This endangered language is spoken in Southern Arizona and in Sonora, Mexico; there are approximately 8,000 speakers remaining. The second project consists of introducing service-learning into linguistics courses. Service-learning is...
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