Documenting Endangered Iranian Languages

See below for the exact timetable. The basic daily schedule will be as follows: Each day consists of four 90-minute blocks. The course types will be: Lectures, fieldwork tutorials, courses on documentation essentials (groundwork seminars), and technical demonstrations.

· Lectures (9:00-10:30) are intended to provide an introduction and state of the art overview to the issues of language endangerment, and language documentation.

· Fieldwork tutorials (11:00-12:30) continue the proven tradition of intensive, daily group interaction with a native speaker of a little-known language, under the guidance of an experienced field worker. Languages chosen will be lesser-known languages from the target group. We expect to have five groups of five students in each tutorial, with the groups staying together for the duration of the summer school.

· Groundwork seminars (14:00-15:30) are intended to cover the essentials of language documentation (phonetics and phonology, transcription systems, writing systems, corpus compilation and organisation, organising a grammatical description, lexicography, community interaction, archiving), but will include courses from other disciplines (ethnography, anthropology), and courses tailored to the Iranian context.

· Technical demonstrations (16:00-17:30) Here students learn hands-on skills such as using different types of hard- and software, with an emphasis on gaining practical experience under skilled supervision.

· Workshop/Panel Scheduled for day 5, this workshop will draw together specialists from the different fields with the aim of establishing guidelines for future archiving initiatives. There already exist several valuable resources, and it is to be hoped that by bringing experts from the field together with those involved in developing the DoBeS-archiving project, a greater degree of accessibility and compatibility among the different resources can be achieved. The workshop would seek first to establish a catalogue of existing linguistic and cultural resources, second, to establish blueprints for practicable and accessible future archiving, and third, decide whether setting up a central archive is feasible, or whether a network of closely coordinated archiving initiatives is more realistic.

Timetable