Language documentation

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Language documentation is the process by which a language is documented from a documentary linguistics perspective. It aims to “to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community” (Himmelmann 1998:166, see also Himmelmann 2006, Woodbury 2003). Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization.

Typical steps involve recording, annotation and analysis, translation into a language of wider communication, archiving and dissemination.

Language documentation differs from language description which aims to describe a language's abstract system of structures and rules in the form of a grammar or dictionary.

1 Types of language description
2 Related research areas
3 Representation of speech
4 Organizations involved in language documentation

[edit] Types of language description

Language description, as a task within linguistics, may be divided into separate areas of specialization, including:

Phonetics, the study of the sounds of human language
Phonology, the study of the sound system of a language
Morphology, the study of the internal structure of words
Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
Historical linguistics, the study of languages whose historical relations are recognizable through similarities in vocabulary, word formation, and syntax
Pragmatics, the study of how language is used by its speakers
Stylistics, the study of style in languages