Documenting Endangered Iranian Languages

Aims of the Summer School

This Summer School aims at providing students and researchers a solid grounding in the objectives, theory and practice of language documentation. It is tailored specifically to meet the requirements of documenting endangered Iranian languages. However, we will also be considering "Iranian" in a broader areal sense to include other languages spoken in Iran and neighbouring countries (e.g. Turkic, Semitic, Kartvelian, other branches of Indo-European). Thus while the focus is on languages of a particular genetic affiliation, there is also a common cultural context prevalent in the region, which cross-cuts the boundaries of language families, so scholars working on these languages also stand to gain from attending the Summer School.

General background

This Summer School is generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation's programme Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen (DoBeS)http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES, and a good deal of the expertise that has flowed into the programme stems from the experience and skills that have been developed over the past seven years within scope of DoBeS-funded projects. The host institution is the Seminar für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft of the University of Kiel, which has been heavily involved in a number of language documentation projects for several years projects. In addition to language documentation, the seminar also has a regional research speciality in Iranian languages. The Summer School essentially grew out of the synthesis of these two areas. In this connection, we would like to draw attention to the Second International Conference on Iranian Languages which will take place at the University of Hamburg on 17-19. August icil2 i.e. the weekend immediately prior to the Summer School. As Hamburg is just one hour's journey away from Kiel, participants who will be able to combine attending the conference with attending the Summer School.

Over the past decade, interest in language documentation has experienced a dramatic upsurge, leading to significant increases in levels of theoretical and technical sophistication, in awareness of ethical issues and responsibilities, and in the range and accessibilty of the data being made available. Language documentation is now a highly professional enterprise, synthesising theory and technology from a broad variety of fields (see for example Gippert/Himmelmann/Mosel (2006) for a state-of-the-art overview.)

Nevertheless, large-scale documentation projects are notably lacking for some areas of the globe, in particular the Middle East. This summer school therefore targets languages of the Iranian group, one of the geographically most extensive, and typologically most diverse branches of Indo-European, which includes languages spoken in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, and Turkey, with outliers in the Caucasus (Ossetic) and Oman (Kumzari). A large number of these languages (exact figures are not available) are highly endangered or moribund. The variety exhibited by the languages themselves is matched by the range of cultural settings in which they are spoken, which includes several extremely vulnerable religious communities (e.g. Zoroastrians, Ahl-i Haqq, Yezidis). In addition to languages actually belonging to the Iranian group, non-Iranian, but highly endangered languages spoken in the state of Iran (which include Semitic, Turkic and Kartvelian languages) will also be eligible for consideration.
While scholars in disciplines such as Iranian philology have accumulated an impressive bedrock of knowledge on many of these languages, there has as yet been relatively few attempts to synchronize the work of these traditional disciplines with the global enterprise of language documentation. We trust the Summer School will act as a catalyst in stimulating cooperation across the fields, and will also trigger increased efforts at documentation in the region.