In the last decade of the 20th century a new field of language research emerged that has come to be known as ‘language documentation’ or ‘documentary lingusitics’ (Himmelmann 1998, 2002, 2006; Lehmann 2001; Austin 2010; Grenoble 2010; Woodbury 2003, 2011). In this paper we explore how it was defined in the seminal work of Himmelmann (1998) and…[Read more]

One of the main responses of academia to language endangerment has been the development of the sub-field of Language Documentation (LD, also called Documentary Linguistics). Himmelmann (1998: 161) presented its main goal as ‘to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community’ Himmelmann (20…[Read more]