4. Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties

Abstract

Loss of linguistic diversity is viewed by many as one of the great ecological disasters of the twenty-first century, and the Romance language family has not been spared. This chapter deals with unique challenges to the study and documentation of endangered Romance languages. We consider the question of language vs dialect, and the added problems faced by endangered varieties deemed “dialects”. The role played by the highly prestigious and structurally related national languages of the countries in which the endangered varieties are spoken is analysedwithin the fieldwork context, as speakersmaypossess a spectrumof linguistic abilities, from thenational standard toan archaic local variety. Fieldworkmethods and language documentation/description are discussed, alongwith the types of resources producedand their accessibility.